We saw the new series about the romance of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessettes and YIKES

“Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette” chronicles Bessette’s path from a private citizen working in Calvin Klein’s advertising department to the enigmatic wife of a former president’s son.

“She knows that if she marries him, that will be his defining characteristic. It will be like she never existed before she met him,” a colleague says of Carolyn Bessette (Sarah Pidgeon) in the new FX limited series.

The nine-episode series, part of an anthology from writer-director Ryan Murphy, uses the Kennedy charm that transformed Bessette into an instant celebrity to draw in viewers. However, while the show attempts to explore the inner workings of the high-profile ’90s couple through fictional events and dramatized scenes, it doesn’t add anything new to the public narrative.

The first episode begins on July 16, 1999, when the tragic love story ends. The two board a small plane with Carolyn’s sister Lauren (Sydney Lemmon) to head to Martha’s Vineyard, but they never make it. Five days later, the wreckage of the plane was discovered eight miles offshore and their bodies were recovered.

After opening with the flight that will result in their untimely deaths, the show returns to the lives of Carolyn and John (Paul Anthony Kelly) before they met. She works with VIP clients at Calvin Klein and he just failed the bar exam. Over the next eight episodes, the show moves through the biggest moments of their relationship: meeting through Calvin Klein (Alessandro Nivola), dating, breaking up, reconnecting, getting engaged, planning a secret wedding, and struggling with the pressures of marriage and paparazzi.

This simple path is your trap. The show feels like watching a condensed timeline of a relationship that you’d read online rather than the organic progression of a romance that you’re watching unfold.

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The series, based on Elizabeth Beller’s book, “Once Upon a Time: The Captivating Life of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy,” clearly points to the opposite. He wants to show how complex Carolyn’s figure was and how the complicated love between the two unraveled under the pressure of the paparazzi and the expectation of being a Kennedy. Instead, it relies too heavily on the elements that made Carolyn and John famous, including their style and his family.

In one of my favorite moments from Murphy’s 2010s show “Glee,” Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) says that a rival glee club isn’t worth worrying about because she has no talent. Instead, the club is “all smoke and mirrors.”

“It’s called hairography,” Rachel explains.

“Hairdresser” is an apt description of “Love Story.” This is partly because Pidgeon’s long blonde hair regularly appears in scenes to convey Carolyn’s attractiveness, and partly because the show’s high-quality production relies on a carefully curated combination of costumes, sets and styling to lend authenticity to the story.

However, the effect of Carolyn and John’s hyper-bright world is that, as the series progresses, it all begins to seem as superficial a distraction as the sensational photographs of the couple that flooded newspapers and magazines in the ’90s.

For a couple whose relationship was so well covered in the press, the events and pressures that led to their relationship and caused it to fall apart are clear, but the show’s exploration of why they fell in love and how that fall apart occurred is pure conjecture, and the conjecture just isn’t that novel.

So what is the goal of the “Love Story” anthology?

Personally, the most interesting opportunity in reexamining famous modern couples is the way those stories act as lenses that help us see our own love stories more clearly. Here I was drawn to the tension that exists between choosing a person and choosing the life that accompanies them.

At one point in the show, Carolyn says she chose John “despite his life.” His sister-in-law, Caroline (Grace Gummer), responds, “Then I really don’t know what to tell you.” Neither does the show. It highlights how marriage changes Carolyn’s reality, but doesn’t do enough to explore why the viewer should care.

The same applies to marriage itself. A persistent theme of the story is Carolyn’s distrust of romantic relationships, arising from her parents’ divorce. At one point during their courtship, she tells John, “Everything ends.”

To which he replies: “Not us.”

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Because the show focuses on John’s crush on Carolyn, not enough space is devoted to what sets this relationship apart from the other women he’s dated, or why Carolyn is willing to trust and make the personal sacrifices a life with him requires.

These issues are a loss for the show because there is potential to explore them.

This is also why, although well produced and may be of interest to those drawn to stories about the Kennedy family’s cultural legacy, this limited series seems recycled and as irrelevant as paparazzi photographs from three decades ago.

The first three episodes of ‘Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’ are currently available to stream on Hulu, and a new episode will air each subsequent Thursday on FX at 9 pm ET/PT and on Hulu the following day.