Ryan Murphy: Who Hurt You and Why Am I Still Watching?

As a kid, I memorized every celebrity in Us Weekly. As an adult, Ryan Murphy’s glossy retellings of real tragedies leave me wondering if enjoying them makes me complicit.

Paul Kelly as John F. Kennedy Jr. and Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy in American Love Story, Ryan Murphy’s lavish recreation of one of the most mythologized celebrity couples of the 1990s. Photo courtesy of FX.

I practically grew up in an orthodontist’s chair. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Headgear, palate expander, lip bumper—the whole medieval torture starter pack. I was there so often that the receptionist greeted me like a coworker. The only upside was the waiting room coffee table, which was stacked with glossy copies of People and US Weekly.

While other kids flipped through Highlights magazine looking for hidden cartoons and ethics lessons from Goofus & Galant, I was studying celebrity culture like it was a graduate thesis. It felt like mythology unfolding in real time. I knew every celebrity face, every scandal, every breakup, every bad haircut. I could identify a famous person from a paparazzi photo that only showed the crook of an elbow and a pair of sunglasses. I was an absolute savant of tabloid culture.

Now, I stand in line at the grocery store and stare at the same magazine racks and feel like I’ve been transported to another planet. I don't recognize a single, solitary soul. Every time someone mentions a Hollywood headline I find myself saying, “No clue who those folks are.”

But there were a few figures back then who lived permanently in my imagination.

John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette were one of those couples who seemed to exist in a slightly different universe than the rest of us. They had the expected Camelot fantasy energy, but cooler and more modern. Carolyn, in particular, fascinated me. She looked like someone who had accidentally wandered into fame and couldn’t quite be bothered with it. Straight blonde blowout, black Calvin Klein slip dresses, sunglasses permanently perched on her face like a shield against the circus.

My daughter observed, "she's giving Clean Girl aesthetic before that was a thing."

Nailed it, kid.

Meanwhile, JFK Jr. had the kind of public image that no longer exists. Handsome, polished, the son of American royalty—a modern prince who also happened to jog through Central Park. Other than Sasha and Malia, no president's kid has ever had this kind of rizz. When Jr. and Carolyn appeared together in those grainy paparazzi photos, it felt like watching a fairy tale play out on a sidewalk.

I cried during episode 5 when I saw Murphy's recreation of this exact moment.

When their plane went down in 1999, it felt like something larger than two people had died. The cultural grief was intense because what people were really mourning was the delusional idea of Camelot itself—the fantasy that some people really did live charmed lives filled with beauty and romance.

All of this nostalgia came roaring back recently because of Ryan Murphy's American Love Story on FX. The Kennedys have always existed somewhere between politics and mythology. Murphy understands that better than anyone. To him, they aren’t just historical figures—they’re characters in America’s longest-running soap opera.

Now, if you zoom out and look at Murphy’s body of work, the man clearly has a brain that lives in some very strange and occasionally disturbing corners of the human imagination. Twisted, dark corners that make you pause the TV and say, “Ryan… buddy… who hurt you?”

This is the guy behind Nip/Tuck, which somehow made plastic surgery feel like erotic psychological horror. This is the same mind that gave us American Horror Story, where the plotlines regularly wander into sexual and psychological territory so dark you wonder if the writers’ room needs a group therapy session. Then there’s Glee, which somehow managed to exist in the same creative universe as all of that chaos.

Murphy has always had a fascination with spectacle, with pushing boundaries, with turning real or imagined trauma into glossy entertainment. His shows rarely stop at “this happened.” They ask, “How much stranger, darker, and more operatic could this moment become if we turned the dial all the way to eleven?” His storytelling instinct isn’t documentary—it’s gothic pageantry. Violence is aesthetic, with Trauma in production design.

As of late, that tendency has collided head-on with real historical people in ways that make a lot of viewers uncomfortable. His Netflix series Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, is probably the most obvious recent example. The show was a massive hit, but it also triggered a wave of criticism from victims’ families who said they were never consulted and were forced to relive very real and not imagined horror as entertainment. Rita Isbell, whose brother Errol Lindsey was murdered by Dahmer, publicly said that watching the dramatized courtroom scene where her victim impact statement was recreated felt like being traumatized all over again.

Within days of the show’s release, clips of the dramatized version of Isbell’s courtroom speech were circulating on TikTok. The actress’s performance was praised, dissected, and edited into emotional montages. Meanwhile, the real Isbell was still alive, still grieving, watching strangers applaud a recreation of one of the worst days of her life.

And to think, my parents were concerned about the RL Stine and Christopher Pike novels filling my little brain with images of horror. Little did they know what Mr. Murphy had in store for my nightmares in 30 years.

Murphy has also been criticized for how he reshapes other real stories. His dramatizations connected to figures like Ed Gein lean heavily into lurid mythology about the killer that historians say exaggerates or outright invents details. Gein’s real crimes were horrifying enough without embellishment, but television versions often add grotesque elements because they make better storytelling. I’m pretty sure he used some of my 90s orthodontic torture devices on an inbred dwarf trapped inside a haunted bathhouse in an episode of AHS.

Again, Ryan … Who hurt you? Was it also Dr. Cohen with the palate expander? If so, this all sort of makes sense.

Likewise, Murphy’s American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace invented private conversations and speculative motives that friends of Versace said bore little resemblance to the real man’s life. These scenes were gripping television, but they blurred the line between documented history and creative fan fiction.

And now with Murphy's attention turned to JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette with American Love Story, my personal ethical crisis begins.

Because the show is, unfortunately, very good.

The casting is excellent. The wardrobe department deserves its own award ceremony. The soundtrack feels like someone cracked open a late-90s time capsule. Watching it is like seeing those old Us Weekly pages from the orthodontist’s office come to life in streaming 4K. There’s something almost surreal about seeing iconic paparazzi photos recreated as moving scenes.

And it works. It pushes every nostalgia button my brain has.

But the longer you watch, the harder it becomes to ignore the strange moral territory the show occupies. These were real people who died tragically. The show imagines their most private conversations, their arguments, their romantic moments, the quiet emotional details of a relationship that none of us were actually present for, or have any reason to bear witness to. Writers sit in a room and invent pillow talk between two people who aren't alive to confirm or deny any of it.

That's kind of sick, right?

At one point, I tried explaining this weird feeling to my daughter. I asked her to imagine someone we have never met deciding to write a television show about her dad and me. They invent dialogue. They write scenes about how we met, how we fought, how we fell in love. They create intimate conversations that never actually happened and then release the series to millions of viewers. And they make a fortune doing it.

When you frame it that way, it starts to feel a little unsettling. Suddenly, it stopped feeling like history and started feeling like voyeurism.

Seriously Ryan, what happened to you?

Yet at the same time, the show is wildly entertaining. I love the fashion. I love the atmosphere. I love revisiting that moment in time. There is something undeniably powerful about storytelling keeping people alive in cultural memory. People are reminiscing on them again … it can’t be that bad, right?

So here’s the ethical knot I can’t quite untangle: on one hand, Ryan Murphy’s work often takes enormous liberties with real people and tragedies, sometimes in ways that families and historians find deeply disrespectful. On the other hand, the shows are beautifully made, compulsively watchable, and capable of resurrecting entire cultural moments that might otherwise fade away into the abyss of time.

Murphy didn’t invent this moral gray zone. Hollywood has been fictionalizing real lives since the silent film era. The difference is that Murphy does it with streaming budgets, algorithmic reach, and a creative sensibility that treats tragedy like high-fashion melodrama. This leaves viewers like me sitting on the couch, fully aware that what we’re watching might be ethically questionable… and still hitting “Next Episode" while asking "Ryan… seriously. Who the hell hurt you?"