Ryan Murphy has already tried to tell Diana’s story. It never happened. Nearly ten years later, however, the success of Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette and the explosive release of Charles Spencer’s Swan Song: Diana, My Sister may have put the princess back in his path. For now, it is only a possibility being floated in Hollywood. But few coincidences seem quite so perfectly suited to Murphy’s universe.

In 2017, even before Feud: Bette and Joan premiered, FX announced that the anthology’s second season would focus on the marriage and divorce of then-Prince Charles and Diana. Ryan Murphy was developing Feud: Charles and Diana with Jon Robin Baitz as a ten-episode season. The story was expected to begin around the divorce proceedings and follow the couple through to Diana’s death in 1997.

It seemed almost inevitable. Few marriages of the 20th century offered material more suited to Feud: infidelity, resentment, competing narratives, historic interviews, the press, popularity, power and, at the center of it all, a centuries-old institution trying to survive the very public collapse of the relationship of its future king. And yet the project never made it to the screen.

For a long time, it was easy to assume the problem had a name: The Crown. Netflix’s series was moving steadily toward the Charles and Diana years and would eventually offer its own version of their story. But when FX confirmed in 2018 that Feud would not move forward, network chairman John Landgraf denied that competition from The Crown was the reason. He said the two productions would have approached the subject very differently. While The Crown largely observed events from inside the Palace, Feud would have followed the woman entering that family. The real problem, Landgraf said, was that they simply had not been able to get the material where they wanted it. Perhaps Ryan Murphy had not yet found his way into Diana.

Curiously, years later, he found a story remarkably close to hers in spirit. Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette follows another young, glamorous couple condemned to live a private relationship under permanent public scrutiny. John was essentially America’s version of royalty; Carolyn entered a family that had become part of the national mythology and quickly discovered that loving a Kennedy also meant belonging to the public.

The series premiered in February 2026 and was not merely well received. It became FX’s most-watched limited series on Disney+, surpassing 25 million hours viewed with its first five episodes alone. Its audience continued to grow week after week, while Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon turned John and Carolyn into pop-culture subjects all over again, nearly three decades after their deaths. The bridge is difficult to miss. And now there is Swan Song.

Charles Spencer’s new book is not simply another conventional biography of his sister. It is Diana told by someone who was inside the story, who knew her from childhood, witnessed part of her marriage and later became a central figure in one of the defining moments after her death. Spencer stood inside Westminster Abbey, delivered the eulogy heard around the world and clashed with the Royal Family over Diana’s funeral and the participation of William and Harry in the procession.

Published in September 2026, the book contains allegations serious enough to provoke something unusual: a direct response from Buckingham Palace. Spencer claims, among other things, that Charles appeared strangely elated after Diana’s death and that, during an argument over the funeral, he suggested she would soon be forgotten. The Palace rejected the claims and responded that grief can cloud reason, judgment and memory, even many years after a loss.

Now Star magazine, citing an unnamed source, claims that studios and streaming platforms are already interested in turning Swan Song into a major production and places Ryan Murphy among the names potentially attracted to the material. So far, there has been no announcement of a rights deal, no confirmed negotiation and no official involvement from Murphy. It is a rumor, and it needs to be treated exactly as that. But it is an unusually interesting rumor, because the missing piece from 2017 may now be sitting directly in front of him.

Murphy would not need to try to make “the Charles and Diana story” all over again. The Crown, documentaries, films, books and virtually every possible form of reconstruction have already done that. Swan Song offers another possibility: Charles Spencer’s Diana. And that shift in point of view changes everything.

Charles Spencer is not a neutral narrator, nor does he claim to be. He is the younger brother speaking almost 30 years after his sister’s death, reconstructing conversations, judgments, resentments and memories that other participants dispute. That is precisely what gives the book dramatic potential. His version would not need to be presented as absolute truth. On the contrary, memory itself could become the subject.

That could also allow Murphy to escape the trap that may have made the original project so difficult. The question would no longer be about reconstructing the Charles-Diana-Camilla triangle yet again. It could instead become a story about who Diana was to the family she was born into, what happened when she entered another family infinitely more powerful, and who earned the right to tell her story once she was gone.

There is also an almost irresistible coincidence. Love Story worked because it was not simply a collection of familiar moments from the lives of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. It was a story about the cost of no longer belonging entirely to yourself. Diana may be the ultimate expression of that same conflict.

Ryan Murphy tried to find her in 2017 and walked away. Perhaps because he was trying to tell a story that had become too large: the marriage, the monarchy, Charles, Camilla, the press, the divorce and the tragedy. Nearly ten years later, Swan Song may offer something simpler and, precisely because of that, stronger: a point of view.

We do not know whether Ryan Murphy will actually make the series. Perhaps no one will. Hollywood is full of contested books, announced projects and stories that never reach the screen. But the irony exists even if no deal ever happens.

After turning John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette into one of television’s biggest successes of 2026, Ryan Murphy may once again be facing the woman whose story he tried to tell before theirs.

This time, perhaps he has finally found the way in.