Sarah Pidgeon has consistently delivered brilliant performances to gracefully portray Carolyn Bessette in a tone that feels respectable, and her work in the latest episode is so raw and haunting that words escape me. There are understandable critiques about the series that need to be said and heard, but it never once sensationalizes what their real counterparts went through, despite discernible inaccuracies here and there.
The series makes a clear point about agency, anonymity, and what it means to be a public figure, serving as a sharp reminder of the fact that the world has only gotten more awful since then.
As a job, journalism is sacred to me. When I first took classes during my undergrad, prior to recognizing that I’d prefer to major in English, the intensity of its seriousness terrified me. What if I reported something incorrectly and it spread like rabid fire? At the time, social media wasn’t even as accessible as it is today, but my anxious OCD brain still questioned all the worst possible outcomes. What if I were responsible for someone’s hurt or pain?
When I eventually made my way to entertainment journalism, I made a commitment to only speculating where fiction was concerned and never the lives of real actors, because, despite what headlines sold, that’s never something I wanted. Still, in this job, we can’t always separate the two, but we can control the narrative by ensuring there’s authenticity and factual proof, as well as agency, brought on by interviews, verified social media posts, and permission.
Because of this, a show like Love Story is a tricky one to take on, morally and in every way possible. But what’s so easy to appreciate is the source material it’s based on. In Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, Elizabeth Beller doesn’t try to exploit a woman who didn’t want to be known, but she tries to remind us of all that Carolyn Bessette stood for and how the public fully destroyed her spirit by picking apart her every action. We see this clear as day in the show all throughout, but most accurately in this aptly titled episode.
The paparazzi’s obsession with anyone famous is absurd. It’s even worse today, with the exception of small boundaries that are in place, but how is it still such a huge problem? And back then? How could any man or woman survive that much scrutiny? How could anyone survive losing their agency in that regard when it’s not what they chose, but the life their partner was born into? And even if a public job is something they chose, no one signs up to give so much of themselves to the world freely.
And again, Carolyn Bessette never chose fame, she chose love. No matter how we examine that, in the real world or in the fictional, the loss of her agency is terrifying. It’s abhorrent. It’s unthinkable on so many levels that this article could result in a lengthy novel if I were to pick apart every detail in how taxing the paparazzi’s involvement in celebrity culture is. Not to mention, parasocial relationships that stem from a famous person’s public appearance. The belief that public citizens, actors, or anyone famous owes us anything beyond the job they signed up to do is, in short, wrong.
So while a series like Love Story maybe shouldn’t have been made, there’s a lesson to take away from it. The point the show makes isn’t that the lives of this renowned couple were glamorous or illustrious, but as we also saw in “Battery Park,” it was theirs and theirs alone—the good, the bad, and the ugly, like all love stories. We were never owed any part of it, and we were especially owed nothing from Carolyn Bessette. And from the moment “Obsession” begins, to the last shot we see her in, Sarah Pidgeon delivers the most hauntingly profound performance I’ve seen in years. Raw and vulnerable on such a molecular level that the anxiety I was experiencing all day had me fighting my own breakdown.
Sarah Pidgeon’s performance is so profoundly evocative that with all the pieces of Carolyn the paparazzi pilfered, Pidgeon gives them away to the audience with the kind of performance that’s astounding—breathtaking, and indescribable. You can’t help but sit with your mouth agape, wondering how on earth someone can sit behind a paper and write such horrible things about a woman, speculating about her body…and oh, wait a second. This isn’t something that’s changed in 2026, nor will Love Story’s “Obsession” serve as a cautionary tale, even though it should be.
Because that’s not the world we live in. The one we exist in is far more cruel and overwhelming in the worst possible way. The accessibility the public has to people is unthinkable. Women are still forced into boxes and standards that men can’t even fathom, torn to shreds at every chance people get, just because they didn’t smile. Another topic countless dissertations have already been written on because it’s a constant, exhausting battle we fight daily.
This performance, in a lot of ways, could’ve been overdone, but Sarah Pidgeon’s ability to show us all that’s necessary while keeping things close to her chest is exactly what ensures it sticks the landing. The hollowness in her eyes that slowly deepens as her physicality crumbles under the pressure is monumental in delivering just how it’s all destroying her.
The way she cries, the gutting scream, and how her eyes plead for an end to the heartache is brilliant on so many levels, we can study it for hours if it wasn’t such a tough scene to watch. She isn’t the same woman we met in the pilot, and it’s so obvious, it’s utterly heartbreaking. Every small change in Carolyn is on full display, from the moments where temporary beats of salvation allow her a sliver of joy to the second every fractured piece of her falls to the floor, shattering her fully. Pidgeon shows us everything with the type of performance that feels so real, I hope it actually does change something in the people who forget to remember the humanity in the celebrity.
And I, for one, can’t wait to see her take home the Emmy Award.
First Featured Image Credit: ©FX/Hulu