Brad: We have those shirts.
That’s amazing. Nina, what surprised you most about that?
Nina Jacobson: I mean, I loved the fact that they had to have a party for the people who weren’t invited. That detail really was incredible—and to imagine how awkward that was—but also it was them trying to have something that was just for them when the expectation is that you belong to everyone. It was an early iteration of the parasocial relationships. Today there’s this expectation that you belong to the public, your fans, your followers—a possessiveness and an expectation—and by wanting something private and selective and just for them, that really is what in some ways set the fuse on fire for the kind of insanity and voracious hunger that people had for more images, particularly of her, and of her refusal to play ball.
Very true.
Nina: The idea that having the wedding you wanted to have could make so many people so angry and set the stage for what was ultimately a sort of misogynistic turn in which the vacuum created by her unwillingness to be the public figure that people wanted her to be was filled with such nasty and vicious rumor and innuendo and the villainizing of her.
That’s why I loved that scene early in the episode where Carolyn and John are being silly dancing together in their sweats. She’s so joyous and fun.
Brad: The common people. Yeah. It’s interesting because this is a show without a villain, really. Caroline [Kennedy] and Carolyn [Bessette] have issues, but the show doesn’t really have a villain, and this is the episode that we wanted to have. The conflict that you have in a wedding, but it’s also the most conflict-free—we want it to be celebratory. We want it to be the experience everybody would have of planning their wedding, deciding who’s invited, where are you going to have it? The struggles with your in-laws, the struggles with the sister-in-law. A lot of the things that we used to dramatize, I mean, they were very dramatic, like her deciding not to have Calvin do the dress. That was a big thing, and it made Narciso’s career overnight. He became a famous fashion designer, and she knew what she was doing when she did that. Then the heartbreaking decision to have Caroline be her maid of honor at the expense of her sister and how difficult that was.
We also knew that Carolyn’s mother, Ann, had given a speech at the wedding. We had the contours of what the speech was, but writer Julie Weiner, in collaboration with creator Connor Hines, had to come up with what that speech was.
