What Is With… TV shows romanticising controversial 1990s icons like Tyra Banks and Carolyn Bessette?

SINGAPORE – For the past two weeks, most of the internet (at least over in the United States) has been swept up in Carolyn Bessette Kennedy fever.

The late American fashion publicist – CBK to her adoring masses – and her husband, political scion John F. Kennedy Jr, are the subjects of Hollywood producer Ryan Murphy’s new series Love Story, currently available on Disney+.

Starring Sarah Pidgeon and Paul Anthony Kelly, the biographical anthology charts, with some creative liberties, the pair’s whirlwind courtship and marriage – from 1992 up until they perished in a tragic plane crash in 1999.

They were, to many, America’s last great “royal” couple, and the subject of intense public scrutiny throughout their relationship. Almost 30 years after their tragic passing, they are back at the centre of media attention.

On the fashion front, everyone is trying to steal their style. Hers: plain black long-sleeved tops and turtlenecks – or a crisp white button-down – paired with jeans, camel midi skirts, black slip dresses and the minimalist tailoring of Calvin Klein, her former employer.

His: vests layered over open-collared plaid shirts, preppy chic, tweed blazers, berets and that quintessential backwards cap. Even Uniqlo, purveyor of minimalist basics, jumped on the bandwagon with a styling inspiration post.

Netizens have crooned over their seeming whirlwind romance, idolising them as the ultimate “it” couple before “it” couples were an Instagram aesthetic. His killer mix of laid-back cool and boyish charisma perfectly complemented her insouciant “cool girl” persona.

Adapting the truth

Yet the reality was far from it.

Somehow, it seems a generation nostalgic for the 1990s has helped reframe a story entirely.

Those who lived through the 1990s recalled that few in the public liked them together. Their fights were an explosive, public affair, keenly captured by the paparazzi and blown up in tabloids. Overlapping timelines put forth by multiple sources alleged that they cheated on each other. It was well known that towards the end of their relationship, the pair were living apart.

A 2003 Vanity Fair article detailed how, in their final days, JFK Jr had confided in a friend that he and Bessette Kennedy had become like strangers.

Is the hunger for romance and the unknowable pre-smartphone, pre-Y2K era so strong that it can addle an entire population of minds to conveniently forget the ugly truth? It took several finger-wagging TikTok users who “lived in New York in the ’90s” to set the record straight.

Love Story’s fifth episode recreated the couple’s infamous physical fight in Washington Square Park, yet the stilted tableaus still take a back seat to the overall love story.

There is some resemblance to Emerald Fennell’s 2026 film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte’s 1847 gothic horror tale of domestic abuse and control now given a glossy, lust-fuelled new sheen.

Thanks to an all-consuming press tour and choice film stills, Heathcliff and Catherine’s toxic, self-destructive relationship play second fiddle to corset-gripping, yearning and the bosom-heaving star-crossed lovers act put up by its impossibly beautiful leads, Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie.

We have, quite literally, lost the plot.

It begs the questions: Who gets to rewrite history? Who gets to decide which stories can be told, interpreted or adapted?

The short answer would be whoever has deep pockets. And, if streaming services have their way, anyone with a production crew at their service.

In June 2025, Jack Schlossberg, JFK Jr’s nephew, criticised Love Story for not consulting the Kennedy family during development. He said he felt the production was “profiting off his uncle’s life in a grotesque way”.

As show producers capitalise on the opportunity to introduce old stories to a new generation, the ethics of representing these facts truthfully are called into question.

Product of their time?

Consider another recent show. Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model (ANTM) dropped on Netflix the same week in mid-February, and examined the cultural impact and controversies of the reality modelling show that ran from 2003 to 2018.

The docuseries resurfaced past challenges that put the contestants in danger, and the verbal and psychological torment they were subjected to. Critics and netizens have slammed it for favouring the judges’ perspective and letting them off easy – especially ANTM creator and host, American supermodel Tyra Banks.

ANTM itself has been filtered through multiple layers of interpretation.

One of the most-watched shows in the mid-2000s, it went through an earlier reckoning in 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns that kept people home and consuming media past and present led to a renewed surge of interest – and fresh criticism from a generation that had not grown up with it.

Cue the clips of disgusted internet reactions. Photo shoots where contestants were asked to pose as the homeless, drug-addicted or victims of violent crime “aged like milk”, as did the race-swopping challenges and rampant body-shaming.

Then came Reality Check to simultaneously expose yet platform the voices of the “villains” in a half-baked attempt to save its image. Clad in a trench coat that has already drawn flak for serving as proverbial armour, Banks offered several justifications – “it was a different time”, “we had to prepare them to be working models”, “just a whole different lens”.

Her subtext was clear: The new “woke” generation showed no grace to how both the show and its cast were products of its time – a time less complicated by social politics.

Conscious consumption

Was she right, or the online “woke brigade”? I found myself questioning my memory of the events, as an obsessed millennial who had devoured each season in real time.

Had Banks and her fellow judges really been that harsh? Sure, some of the challenges seemed shocking then, but were we not taught that shock value was part and parcel of good entertainment?

Scientists and philosophers will tell you that memory is a fickle thing, but had our collective consciousness been that wily to erase the most damaging parts of the 2000s, leaving only the romanticism?

With the weeping accounts of former contestants staring us in the face, it is easy now to claim that one “always knew it was wrong”. Perhaps we as viewers let it slide then because we believed, caught up in the faraway glamour of the fashion industry, this was how the world worked.

That hazy recollection is set to be questioned again in March when television network E! drops its docuseries Dirty Rotten Scandals, which will look at the contentious history of ANTM – alongside that of equally dubious, potentially exploitative, television programmes Dr Phil (2002 to 2023) and The Price Is Right (1972 to 2007).

Netizens have already been squawking that this rival documentary, from which Banks is conspicuously absent, may present a more objective truth.

What Love Story and Reality Check have in common is an eagerness to resurface the “glamorous” 1990s and 2000s eras for a generation that has not lived through, yet craves, them. And in catering to views, both shows are willing to give its villains grace, perhaps unfairly so.

Some media is meant to be escapist, for careless consumption, to allow us to turn off our brains after a long day.

Others demand reflection. When shows straddle fiction and fact, we as viewers become part of the story, and have a role to play in consuming and interpreting responsibly – no matter how pretty the clothes or people are.