This year marks the 20th anniversary of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s fatal flight. Three days in and already the hagiographic retellings have begun.

“The Last Days of JFK Jr.,” a two-hour special promising new details and new interviews under the ABC News banner, aired Thursday night. Not only did the program soft-pedal Kennedy’s complete and utter fault for the crash but it got crucial details wrong — claiming that the FAA said flying conditions that night were “excellent” (according to the National Transportation Safety Board review of the crash, they were extremely poor, and JFK Jr. would have known it), and that his flight instructor was unavailable that night to fly with him. In fact, the NTSB report said one of Kennedy’s instructors did offer to fly with him, but Kennedy said no, that “he wanted to do it alone.”

Philosophically, though, there’s a much more malignant problem here: the continued idolatry of all things Kennedy, the media’s reluctance or outright refusal to acknowledge the clan’s dark and sometimes criminal side, and — when she’s not been villainized as the cause of all John’s woes, if not the fatal accident — the perfunctory treatment of Carolyn in this narrative.

JFK Jr. was 38 when he died, Carolyn only 33. Her sister Lauren, 34 and an extremely accomplished Morgan Stanley investment banker, has been relegated to a mere footnote. After all, as ABC touted in its promos, “We lost that dream. We lost that legacy.”

Did we?

Before going any further, let’s acknowledge that, yes, JFK Jr. was by all accounts a lovely person. He wore his fame lightly and moved through New York City as one of us. He understood that his looks and pedigree gave him a place in history that wasn’t quite earned. He was a unique figure in American life.

Yet he also loved celebrity. He was an exhibitionist who often went shirtless in public. He dated movie stars and Madonna. He would go on to co-found George magazine, leveraging his fame to lure supermodels and A-list actresses for his covers and installing himself as editor in chief despite having no journalistic or publishing experience. Yet Kennedy seemed confounded when, after a burst of initial hype and success, the magazine soon floundered.

He was not above cheap stunts: having Drew Barrymore pose as his father’s mistress Marilyn Monroe, the mistress who perhaps caused his mother the most pain; inviting Hustler’s Larry Flynt, who infamously published nude photos of Jackie O. sunbathing, to sit with him at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. The latter was too much for even Uncle Ted Kennedy — Chappaquiddick, never forget — who wrote his nephew a letter expressing his deep disappointment.

But JFK Jr. was set up, by us and his own family, to reach beyond his abilities. In 1988, at just 27 years old, he gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention and was received as the Second Coming. And so began the drumbeat for Jr.’s inevitable run for president — though he was a poor student who was nearly thrown out of Brown University several times and would go on to fail the bar exam twice. If not for his looks, he might have been a beta Kennedy.

“I’m clearly not a major legal genius,” he told the press after attempt No. 2. Yet he had a high-profile job with Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau’s office — a job he really didn’t want, yet took to placate his mother, Jackie, herself keeping an eye on her son’s place in the political dynasty.

Dynastic American politics — yet another scourge, one that accounts for the fly strip of mediocre third- and fourth-generation Kennedys still hanging around.

The ABC special also grossly romanticizes JFK Jr.’s fate by repeating the canard that Jackie begged her son not to get his pilot’s license because she “had a premonition” he would die in a plane crash. Perhaps it was just a rational fear? She knew her son had a limited attention span, a high threshold for risk, and an attraction to danger.

One illuminating part of the ABC special: Kennedy’s friends called him “the master of disaster.” He would often swim in the ocean, alone, as his horrified friends watched him disappear on the horizon line. He’d get in his kayak in New York Harbor and play chicken with the Staten Island Ferry. He once asked permission to rappel down the face of Mount Rushmore.

In that case, thankfully, someone had the temerity to say no. But one gets the sense it was not a word Kennedy heard often.

And so we come to the night of the crash, which, for the past 20 years, has been told and retold as an inevitability, the Kennedy Curse striking again. But the Kennedy Curse is simply the

Kennedys themselves, their tragedies most often born of their imperiousness as “American royalty,” their arrogance and recklessness.

John, Lauren and Carolyn were all running late that night, held up by Friday-night traffic in New York — Carolyn the last to arrive, at about 8:20 p.m. The ABC special acknowledges that Kennedy had broken his ankle that summer in another ill-advised stunt — paragliding in a clunky contraption — and had just gotten his cast off. His ankle wasn’t fully healed.

Also: that he had a new Piper Saratoga, a craft far too sophisticated for a beginner; that he was stressed over his failing magazine and his possibly troubled marriage; that he had less than an hour in the air at night without an instructor; that he wasn’t “instrument-rated,” meaning he was able only to pilot manually in clear weather; and that instead of hugging the lit-up coastline, flying from New Jersey to Hyannis, he went out over the dark ocean.

“How could this happen?” one friend asks in the special.

Really? How could it not?

It’s hard to imagine the Bessette family having to endure this narrative, told here yet again, as mythologically sad rather than what it was: homicidally negligent at best, criminal at worst.

Here’s what ABC didn’t report: The NTSB blamed JFK Jr. for the crash. He had less than an hour logged flying at night alone. Out of 310 hours logged, Kennedy had only 72 with a flight instructor, which, as The New York Times reported in July 2000, was considered “an unusually low number” by experts. The Times also reported that one pilot said that as he flew over Martha’s Vineyard that night, he thought the whole island had suffered a power outage, and that haze and visibility that night was as low as four miles. The Guardian reported that Kennedy’s certificate “forbade him to fly with visibility less than five miles.”

In the dark, with no horizon, Kennedy was unable to tell the sea from the land from the sky. He became confused: What the pilot may feel the plane is doing is actually different than what the instruments say, and he likely wound up in what’s called the graveyard spiral, plummeting 79 feet per second toward the ocean.

The bodies were so broken and mangled that their condition has never been revealed. Yet the ABC special depicts the air as JFK Jr.’s sacred space, the only place he could go to be alone — no fans, no gawkers, no paparazzi, as if we all did this to him. How about hiring a private plane? The media harping on itself — or its lower classes, the tabloids — as a cause of JFK Jr. and the Bessettes’ death is disgusting and ridiculous.

It’s worth noting that at the height of their global fame, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were able to disappear on a whim. And that relationship, so scandalous in the beginning, played out in the era of cellphones, social media and TMZ. By comparison, the media landscape of 1999 is quaint. If Kennedy didn’t like the press camped outside his Tribeca apartment, hounding his wife as he often said, he easily could have moved them to a luxury doorman building with high-level security and an underground garage: problem solved. But he was complicit. He loved the attention.

Since the media is inevitably going to revisit this tragedy throughout 2019, let’s hope some outlets do right by the Bessette family and disclose what we know of the ugly aftermath. As the New York Post reported in 2013, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. kept a diary of how his own family brutally treated Carolyn’s and Lauren’s mother, Ann Freeman. The clan, RFK Jr. wrote, got thuggish just hours after the plane went missing, telling Freeman that they would bury JFK Jr. in the Kennedy family plot in Massachusetts and that she and her husband “could do with Carolyn as they pleased.”

RFK Jr. also wrote that John’s sister, Caroline, backed out of a meeting with Freeman, instead sending her husband, Ed Schlossberg, even though — or because — “all the Bessette family knows that Ed hated Carolyn and did everything in his power to make her life miserable and … he bullied, bullied, bullied the shattered grieving mother.”

He also wrote that somehow, Ed vetoed RFK Jr.’s plans to speak at the memorial for Carolyn and John because, as Ed told Carolyn’s lone surviving sibling, Lisa, “Kennedys don’t eulogize non-Kennedys.” It also seems a Kennedy-esque tactic to have the bodies cremated and buried at sea, ensuring that any wrongful-death suit to follow — and Freeman did file one — would likely have less medical evidence.

In 2001, the lawsuit was settled, with the Bessette family receiving a reported $15 million. Neither Freeman nor Lisa nor Carolyn and Lauren’s father have ever spoken publicly. They are the only people involved who have shown grace and dignity, and for their sakes — if not, too, for ours — it’s long past time to abandon and reject this gauzy narrative.

Never again let a special or article or biography express the hoary, childish sentiment, as this one does, that JFK Jr. was “the last glimmer of the fantasy that there was once a spot called Camelot.” Or at least acknowledge it for what it was: exactly that, a fantasy.