What was it like exposing your labor of love to the public? “It feels so personal for so long, just you and your computer — nobody else knows what you’re doing,” said Hines, creator and writer on the nine-part series. “It’s a very strange release-and-surrender that you have to engage in.”
Executive produced by the ubiquitous writer, director, and producer Ryan Murphy, Love Story has become FX’s most watched limited series on Hulu and Disney+. The resulting buzz led to an over 9,000% increase in TikTok searches for John and Carolyn a month after the series released with viewership more than quintupling between the first and fifth episodes.
Starring Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly, Love Story takes the viewer through the couple’s seven-year relationship, from their introduction by Calvin Klein at a charity gala in 1992 through their marriage to that fateful plane crash in 1999. We meet Carolyn and John, briefly, before they’re introduced and grieve with their families in the final episode. In between, the viewer travels with them through their honeymoon phase, meeting each other’s families, his proposal and their decision to marry, and throughout it all, dealing with the crushing ever-presence of the paparazzi.
The son of parents from two large Irish Catholic families from the Boston area, Hines — like many Americans — grew up aware of the Kennedys’ cultural prominence. This widespread affinity contributed both to the series’ creation and its popular success. Reception by critics and individuals connected to the Kennedys, however, has been mixed. Some awarded it 10s across the board, while others saw the show as lacking the historical and popular context that make the Kennedys compelling. Then came the personal reactions. Actress Daryl Hannah, a former girlfriend of JFK, Jr., and Jack Schlossberg, a Kennedy family member, took open offense at the fictionalized portrayals. Both heavily criticized the show for misrepresentation and exploitation.
“For the most part,” Hines said, “I felt like what we told aligned really closely with the narrative of their lives based on everything I read.” He focuses on what he could control: “As long as you can stand by your intentions with the project, that’s really the only thing you can hold on to. The rest is not yours.”
“There’s always more to learn; you can always dig deeper. You can always extract more. Have you read everything that’s out there?”
Hines’ intentions with the project are reflected in his approach. Before a writer’s room assembled around him, flanked by a professional research agency, he spent years working quietly with his producers poring over “every book imaginable that had anything to do with the Kennedys.”
As any diligent Hamilton student knows, successful research is both broad and minute. Hines looked closely at material about Carolyn and John’s relationship, of course. But he also fleshed out the personalities of the supporting cast, including JFK, Jr.’s mother and sister, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Caroline Kennedy, and Carolyn’s mentor Calvin Klein, all of whom “could very much have their own series.” He took a maximalist approach. He remembers asking himself, “There’s always more to learn; you can always dig deeper. You can always extract more. Have you read everything that’s out there?”
Unfortunately, “everything that’s out there” on series protagonist Carolyn Bessette was hardly enough. Particularly if you’re interested in the woman who existed before a Kennedy came into her life. Love Story viewers encounter Carolyn as a hardworking right hand to fashion designer Calvin Klein, driven, vibrant, and suspicious of JFK, Jr.’s shimmer. Bringing that person to life required extrapolating from the smallest details. Hines learned, for instance, that she “swore like a sailor” and “loved to be physical. She loved to hold your hand. She loved to brush your hair out of your face.” These elements helped him access the notoriously private woman not represented in sensational headlines and static images.
Not only did this deep dive undergird Hines’ writing and allow him to counsel actors on their motivations, but it bolstered his creativity and confidence. Whenever he lost his way in the writing process, returning to the research gave him “a sense of comfort and safety.” It was also a guiding light personally. Working on Love Story was the “first really, really big job in my career,” he said, adding how he reminded himself, “There were a lot of ways that [I] could fumble this, but it’s not gonna be from a lack of preparation or knowledge.”
Before his big break with Love Story, Hines spent 10 years as an actor and writer in Hollywood. In 2007, he created and starred in the YouTube series Local Attraction where in every episode he played a different terrible archetype of a Tinder date. This led to a script deal with ABC. He went on to play a supporting role in Hulu’s 2019 series Dollface, a post-breakup comedy starring Kat Dennings. More recently, he wrote for Netflix’s 2020 sitcom Space Force starring Steve Carell and the forthcoming Apple series Wild Things starring Jude Law and Andrew Garfield as Siegfried and Roy.
Considering Hines’ career path, one may assume he majored in theatre or creative writing. But his concentration at Hamilton was government. “The reality is that I was doing theatre through all of Hamilton. I just was not confident enough to make it my major,” he said. Instead, he talked himself into what he thought would be a more stable career. But when senior spring came around, “I remember saying to my parents, ‘I still want to do the same thing that I wanted to do when I was 10 years old.”
Hines decided to give it his all, knowing the worst that could happen was failure followed by a course correction. In the end the decision made itself: “I just knew that if I didn’t pursue [my passion], that regret would follow me forever,” he said.
While Hines can now look back knowing he made his 10-year-old-self proud, he wasn’t always so sure. “I was a government major at Hamilton, and then I was catering and nannying in my late 20s,” he said. But, as he advises Hamilton students and graduates to do, he stayed the course. “Everybody will tell you how important it is to self-generate, but nobody really understands what that means,” said Hines, adding that for him it meant “taking the smallest of steps every day to prevent that feeling that you are stuck.”
Writing in his Notes app or picking someone’s brain over coffee — these small actions kept him on track. What are his words of wisdom for Hamilton graduates? “Don’t be afraid to be lost for however long it takes, because I spent a decade knocking on the door with nobody really opening it, and now I’m doing everything that I hoped I’d be doing and more.”
Genevieve Shuster ’20 majored in creative writing and minored in sociology at Hamilton. She earned her MFA in writing from Columbia University where she also spent two years teaching an essay writing course for first-year students. She now works at a women’s sports bar, Athena Keke’s, in Brooklyn.
Posted November 13, 2026
