En Vogue’s “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)” is a timeless hit, and yet it feels like it was expressly written to score Love Story Episode 2’s montage of Carolyn receiving vase after vase of long-stemmed red roses, the first accompanied by a card from John imploring her to forgive him: “It’s not what you think.” In however much time has passed since the end of “Pilot” (Episode 1), Carolyn’s risen high enough at Calvin Klein to have an assistant, Rachel (Haley Root), to refuse the vases from each delivery guy after the first. Carolyn’s love (John’s never gonna get it)!
Many months later, John — 31 in the premiere, now 33 — and his partner Michael J. Berman (Michael Nathanson) are at lunch with a couple of publishing honchos. Because it’s the ’90s, media executives are still using their fat expense accounts to entertain pitches for print magazines they might want to — get this — start, which is what’s happening here: John and Michael’s idea is for George to cover the intersection of politics and pop culture, A-list celebrities appearing on covers winkily nodding to American history. After one honcho leers that he can see Daryl Hannah in a sexy Salem witch outfit, he and his associate reject the idea that Americans will buy a magazine about politics — unless, of course, John wants to go the Martha Stewart Living route and appear on every cover himself. John tensely receives the note: obviously he knows his gorgeous face can move periodicals, but he wants to be taken seriously!
Or so he complains to Anthony in the gym locker room afterward. We’ve barely touched on the current state of John and Daryl’s relationship — she was spotted shopping for a wedding dress in Santa Monica — when an attendant rushes in to tell John Caroline’s on the phone from the hospital…
…because Jackie was just thrown from a horse. Her doctor quizzes her about her overall health, and Jackie brags about her fitness and diet, forcing Caroline to blurt that she smokes. Jackie dismisses her companion Maurice (Adam Grupper) and Caroline to hassle John in private about his new project: why would he want to break into the industry that has profited off his family’s misery for decades — and after he’s finally passed the bar! John says that his father wanted to be a journalist before his father Joe roped him into politics, so the interest isn’t coming out of nowhere, as Jackie claims.
Maybe John should just relax his personal standards and commit to being handsome on a professional basis, because it seems like there’s about to be an opening at Calvin Klein: “Marky” Mark Wahlberg, star of the company’s blockbuster ad campaign, just punched Guy Oseary, head of Madonna’s record label, and verbally abused another member of her entourage. Todd (Richard Neil) the suit shrugs that Mark “only called the guy a homo” — surely they all assume he meant “f—-t.” “Yeah, he’s practically Harvey Milk,” Carolyn snarks. Because of the gay rumors about Calvin we heard about in the first episode, his wife Kelly (Leila George) gets nervous when he says they need to fire Mark and issue a statement condemning him. Is he going to make the statement personally? Flinching away when she grazes his arm, Calvin says no.
Mark’s replacement should be a fresh face, not another celebrity. Todd smarms that since Calvin plucked Kate Moss from obscurity, he can certainly mint another star. Carolyn ruefully absorbs this erasure of her part in Kate’s ascendancy — she has a model to smuggle out of Moscow. Too bad she’s not currently on speaking terms with someone who can probably get Bill Clinton on the phone!
Party time! Kelly has “curated” a coffee table book, Pools, and the launch event Carolyn has organized is hopping; among the hunky waiters in Calvin Klein briefs is Michael Bergin, aka Store Brand John. He looks good enough mostly naked for Carolyn to throw him a flirt despite apparently having ignored dozens of his voicemails. She’s just told Michael he’s one of about five men in the city who could pull off this uniform when she hears cameras clicking: John’s here.
Carolyn is cool as an infinity pool when she and John end up in the same quiet corner together. Carolyn teases him about making such a big entrance, cracking that she was hoping it was Prince. He perks up: is Prince is supposed to come tonight? Her withering reply — “Do you think Prince RSVPs?” — does not deter him from asking about his roses. Multiple bouquets sent to her office weren’t necessary, she says, and Calvin only permits white orchids. She’s made an elegant exit when he runs after her, causing her implacable mask to slip: she assumes his girlfriend Daryl can understand the weird fishbowl he lives in, and if Carolyn were John she wouldn’t want to give that up either, so the two of them should just be friends. Desperately, John says he wishes he had been someone else when he met Carolyn. “It is what it is,” Carolyn replies. “I’ll see you around.” Queen Of Playing Hard-To-Get. Too bad Grace didn’t get on the guest list; she should be taking notes.
As the party breaks up, Kelly takes a cheeky drag off Carolyn’s cigarette and snorts at the idea that Calvin might catch her smoking: he’s across the room soaking up attention from a clutch of hot young guys. Kelly changes the subject to John, waving off Carolyn’s claim that she just wants to be friends. Kelly does admit, however, that there are trade-offs being with “shiny people,” who belong to everyone: “It’s better to be adored than enamored.” Hmm, where is Michael right about now?
Already upset by his disappointing reunion with Carolyn, John’s mood only darkens when he comes home to Daryl doing a headstand surrounded by her friends, next to a silver tray with plentiful cocaine residue.
John testily excuses himself to crash…in the bedroom loft, completely open to the rest of the apartment. This is how you know John probably bought this place in his twenties: any older than that and he’d be much more protective of his sleep! (Just me?) When Daryl follows, each blames the other for the reconciliation that’s making them both miserable. She just wants him to need her as much as she needs him. He doesn’t understand, and she shoots back, “That’s because you’re repressed….Between your lineage and your heritage, you’re, like, the poster child for emotional avoidance.” She’s annoying and he’s emotionally unavailable, but by all means, they should keep fighting for whatever this is.
Elsewhere, Carolyn is making herself emotionally available to Michael, in bed. When she pinches him on the pec and he asks why she always does it, she tells a story about playing hide and seek a little too well as a kid; realizing that no one found her because they forgot her sent her into a panic attack; her mother told Carolyn to pinch her mother’s arm to focus on something else, which eventually worked. Michael saying he never would have stopped looking for her seems to spook Carolyn into shutting down again…
…but a timely Today talking head from John the next morning leads Carolyn to bring Michael to the empty showroom on the weekend (not sure Katie Couric ever worked a Saturday, but sure) and dress him up like a Ken doll. Afterward, as he does pull-ups on a scaffold outside, Carolyn looks past him to the plywood papered with Marky Mark’s Calvin Klein posters and gets an idea.
On the Upper East Side, the Schlossbergs wait across from Daryl and John, Jackie’s empty seat a silent rebuke. When Eugie says Jackie will be dining in her room, Daryl storms out, screaming at John in the street that it’s obvious why Jackie might be prejudiced against blonde actresses: “She wants you to choose her. She wants you to find YOUR Jackie.” She gets home first and tells John when he returns that she’s leaving…though she also wonders if her current career lull is “the universe” making space for them so Daryl can support John in his next chapter………though she ALSO says that it’s been five years and if John wanted to marry her he would have. He accuses her of trying to manipulate him with her public wedding dress shopping. She says that not everything is a machination of the Kennedy court. She’s going to L.A. and will be back for her dog Hank in a few days; in the meantime, John should think about what HE wants.
What does Carolyn want? For Michael — dressed up in his brand-new Calvin Klein duds — to nail his go-see for Calvin.
Later, Carolyn’s contemplating a wall full of Mark’s possible replacements when Rachel brings her a vase of white orchids, and a card — “Hoping pleasantries are still an option – Sadly not Prince” — that she hides when Michael enters. These flowers, she tells Rachel, can stay at her desk.
John is walking Hank when a fan stops him to autograph John’s “Sexiest Man Alive” People cover, distracting him into letting go of Hank’s leash. John chases him but can’t stop Hank running into the street, directly into the path of a cab. Soon John is on the phone giving a hysterical Daryl the bad news and saying he’s on his way. As he leaves, he misses a call we hear his answering machine pick up: Jackie, trying to smooth things over after boycotting that dinner with Daryl. She hangs up and swoons, taking a few steps and then crumpling to the floor, where Eugie finds her.
Back to John, brooding in his airplane seat, Hank’s urn in his lap. Will I be able to get past one of this show’s protagonists being a careless accomplice in the death of a very good boy? As the season goes on, let’s all find out together!
Love Notes from Episode 2 (“The Pools Party”):
- After the party, Kelly complains to Carolyn about Calvin’s post-rehab sanctimony about her Diet Coke consumption: he’s still relatively fresh out of treatment for “alcohol and prescription drug abuse” he entered in 1988. Fifteen years later, “after his erratic behavior during a Knicks basketball game…briefly forced a halt in play,” Klein returned to in-patient treatment, though the nature of his disordered substance use that time has never been specified, as far as I can tell. The incident made him part of New York City history: six months later, Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed into law what had become known as the “‘Calvin Klein’ bill,” which made “trespassing on the playing area of a major sporting event a misdemeanor and includes jail time and fines ‘for the most unruly of fans.’”
- The episode’s needle drops, beyond En Vogue:
Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV co-founder Tara Ariano has had bylines in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Slate, Salon, Mel Magazine, Collider, and The Awl, among others. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great, Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), Listen To Sassy, and The Sweet Smell Of Succession. She’s also the co-author, with Sarah D. Bunting, of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She lives in Austin.
