Who knew that Ryan Murphy’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette would ricochet through the culture like this? All the girls are now wearing little black shades and flipping their hair about maniacally with a pen in their mouth, while their boyfriends are in backwards Kangol flat-caps and riding bicycles. (Do we think JFK Jr. would have ridden a Citi Bike? Probably!) Sadly, however, this much-discussed TV show has come to its (inevitably tragic) end.
Even so, a second season—focused this time on another famous couple (Love Story was set up to be an anthology series, like American Horror Story and American Crime Story before it)—is looking very likely. In fact, series creator Connor Hines has already hinted that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton could be his next subjects (“They have the right intensity”).
But popular culture is rife with iconic couples. Here, some more hopes and suggestions for Love Story’s sophomore season.
King Charles and Princess Diana
Charles and Diana would give the show’s writers plenty to get into—much of it not worlds apart from what Carolyn Bessette and John F. Kennedy Jr. went through. (Princess Diana died just as tragically, and both she and Carolyn married into world-famous families that made them press magnets.) The Crown may have already pipped them to the post, but one thing’s for certain: the cultural interest in Princess Di, and by extension King Charles and Queen Camilla, is eternal.
Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt, and Angelina Jolie
This would undoubtedly be a legal quagmire—and possibly a little unethical to hash over at this point—but a girl can play make-believe. The love (and then betrayal) story that gripped the aughts, Brad and Jen seemed like the perfect couple… until Brad and Angelina seemed like the perfect couple. (The latter met on the set of the 2005 film Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and both later admitted they’d fallen in love, despite Brad still being married to Jen at the time.) It was all okay in the end, though. Six kids later, Brad and Ange have divorced and Jen’s dating a hypnotherapist.
Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham
Yes, we have Daisy Jones & The Six, but these two deserve the full biopic treatment. Known the world over as possibly the longest on-again off-again situationship of all time, the story of Stevie and Lindsey—who spent the majority of their time in Fleetwood Mac making up, breaking up, and writing songs about it—still has us in a chokehold (“You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loved you… was I just a fool!?”). Give the people what they want!
Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe
Back in 2015, Showtime announced that it would be developing a limited series based on Patti Smith’s award-winning memoir, Just Kids, with Smith attached as writer. Over a decade later, however, the series has yet to arrive—which is a huge shame, really. Their love story—which started as a youthful romance and blossomed into a deep friendship before Mapplethorpe’s untimely death in 1982—deserves its time on screen. (Yes, there was the 2018 film Mapplethorpe, but we want another!) Kristen Stewart as the lead, perhaps?
Jennifer Lopez And Ben Affleck
In some ways, J.Lo and Ben Affleck made for quite an unusual couple: she the glitzy entertainer and peppy pop star behind “Jenny from the Block”; he the perennially tortured actor who likes to smoke cigarettes and stare into space. Somehow, however, sparks flew—twice! “You’re perfect / I just can’t control myself,” J.Lo sang in “Dear Ben,” while he showed his love in other ways, like feeling her up on a yacht. I’m desperate to know what happened behind closed doors—both in the aughts and during Bennifer 2.0 some 20 years later.