Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette holds an approval rating of 80%, based on 50 critics' reviews, with an average rating of 6.7/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "Ryan Murphy's Love Story finds a winning pair in Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon as they embody the tragic, lovely, and shining aspects of John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette in a mindful yet entertaining new series." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 63 out of 100, based on 24 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.
Sarah Pidgeon received praise for her performance as Bessette-Kennedy, with Nicholas Quah of Vulture writing, "Carolyn is the closest thing the show has to a genuinely inhabited character: quick and curious, existentially adrift but committed to selfhood, carrying an undercurrent of anxiety about the world she's entered that the script only intermittently knows what to do with." Critics compared the series to The Crown, with Judy Berman of Time writing both shows depict the "ultimate gilded cage—what perpetual scrutiny does to a family compelled to prioritize appearances over relationships, tradition over love".
However, writers commented that Love Story finds nothing new or insightful to say about its central couple or the Kennedys as an institution. Berman wrote: "For all its flaws, The Crown balanced its royal characters' travails with bigger questions [...] Love Story shows no interest in understanding what the Kennedys meant, and still mean, to a nation that prided itself on having no kings but elevated this particular dynasty as a surrogate royal family. That's a shame, especially as heirs whose affiliations range from the far right to the young left continue to drive American politics. If the people we put on pedestals are mirrors for society, then what did the Kennedys say about us in the 1960s? The '90s? Today?"
In The New Yorker, Doreen St. Félix wrote the series' "Wikipedia-page-like narrowness on the doomed romance excises all that contemporary drama—President Bill Clinton invoking J.F.K. as a forefather, Ted Kennedy, the brother of J.F.K. and R.F.K., recovering from the scandal of Chappaquiddick and the humiliation of a failed Presidential run to become the 'lion' of the Senate—that makes the Kennedy story, one of a relationship to a greater culture". Quah added "Love Story [...] is so tightly focused on the relationship [between Carolyn and John Jr.] that nine episodes of emotional trivialities begin to feel indulgent [...] In flattening the rhythms of Kennedy and Bessette's life together into a cycle of domestic discord, Love Story takes a relationship long freighted with myth, glamour, and cultural obsession and renders it strangely ordinary".
