Revisit a tragic legacy in new American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez trailer

The Ryan Murphy-verse is getting bigger. While FX’s upcoming American Sports Story is distinct from its predecessor, American Crime Story, the series’ first installment could really belong to either show—just as The People V. O.J. Simpson could before it. American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez “charts the rise and fall of NFL superstar Aaron Hernandez and explores the disparate strands of his identity, his family, his career, his suicide and their legacy in sports and American culture,” according to the season’s logline.

The series—which was adapted from the podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc. from The Boston Globe and Wondery—just dropped its first full-length trailer today. Featuring the same tense styling we’ve come to expect from this family of shows, the clip shows a very different side of The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes’ Josh Rivera.

Rivera stars as Hernandez, the NFL tight end who committed suicide in his cell days after being acquitted of a double homicide in 2017. In 2015, Hernandez was found guilty of murdering semi-professional player Odin Lloyd, who was dating Hernandez’s fiancée’s sister at the time. While on trial, he was indicted for, and later acquitted of, a different double homicide. After his death, Hernandez was determined to have been suffering from the worst case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) ever seen in a person so young, at least at that time. 

While no other seasons have been announced thus far, the overall goal of American Sports Story is to be “a scripted anthological limited series focusing on a prominent event involving a sports figure and re-examine it through the prism of today’s world, telling that story from multiple perspectives.” In 2021, FX also announced that it was planning a separate series called American Love Story, a scripted anthology show telling “sweeping true love stories that captured the world’s attention,” but there haven’t been many updates on that particular project since.

American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez also stars Patrick Schwarzenegger, Tammy Blanchard, Lindsay Mendez, Scot Ruggles, Jerry Levine, and more. The 10-episode limited series premieres September 17 on FX and Hulu.