This month, love is in the air — especially on the new Ryan Murphy series, Love Story.
This new anthology is part of Murphy’s ongoing American Story franchise and centers around real-life love stories, with its first season following the passionate romance and tragic demise of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette.
But that got us thinking: if Love Story gets subsequent seasons, what real lovers should Murphy focus on next?
Thankfully, Watch With Us is here to help, and we give away ideas for free. These are our four picks for the real romances we’d like to see told on Love Story.
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez
I mean, duh. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez‘s decades-long, on-and-off love story did get somewhat of a film adaptation in Lopez’s bewildering autobiographical feature This Is Me … Now. However, we feel like Murphy should take a crack at it, from writers and creatives who are a bit more removed from the emotions of it all.
Lopez and Affleck are truly fascinating: their time together began when they dated for a couple of years after filming the disastrous Gigli, then endured once more in a happily-ever-after, true-love-never-dies sort of way with a marriage in 2022. Then, three years later…it was over again. Still, Lopez and Affleck can’t seem to stay out of headlines together, even as he bounces between her and ex-wife Jennifer Garner. Affleck’s sheer commitment to juggling two beautiful women named Jennifer is weirdly endearing, and we’d like to see it in series format.
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry
This one is sort of a gimme, but it’s somewhat shocking that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry‘s chaotic love story has yet to receive the narrative treatment. The coupling of the British royal and the Suits actress was highly controversial in England, especially by the British press and royal inner circle, who disapproved of Meghan’s less aristocratic background.
While the couple did get to bare all in the 2022 Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, it would be interesting to see their story in a way that doesn’t scream so much “direct brand management.” Let’s see all the ugly details, and you know that Ryan Murphy isn’t shy about showing some ugliness.
Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart
We’d be remiss if we didn’t include one Old Hollywood love story, because those guys were getting shacked up with one another and cheating on each other all over the place. But Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart were perhaps the quintessential Old Hollywood couple, having met on the set of the 1945 film To Have and Have Not, where they displayed sexual and romantic chemistry unlike anything before.
On that set, old Bogie fell for the dashing Bacall — who was a whopping 25 years his junior — while still married to his third wife. Bogart and Bacall starred in several movies together, such as The Big Sleep, and they remained with each other until Bogart died in 1957. Their romance has since been lionized in countless interviews with Bacall before she passed away in 2014, so why not devote a serial dramatization depicting their love story?
John Lennon and Yoko Ono
John Lennon and Yoko Ono in The U.S. vs. John Lennon Lions Gate/courtesy Everett Collection
Here’s a famous romantic couple that was passionate, caused the most legendary band of all time to break up and ended in senseless tragedy; it’s bewildering that they still haven’t gotten a major series or film drama treatment. (Maybe that will change with Sam Mendes‘ The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event starring Harris Dickinson as John Lennon and Anna Sawai as Yoko Ono?)
Ryan Murphy is a master at peddling in gaudy sensationalism, and it feels like narrativizing the story of Lennon and Yoko Ono would be right up his wheelhouse. Maybe it would be good, maybe it would be horrifically bad — who knows. We just wanna see what happens if and when he tries. But please, Ryan, don’t cast your perpetual male muse Evan Peters as John!
