American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez puts football on trial

Why do we still allow boys and men to play football? Other things society once found acceptable—smoking, drinking while pregnant, tanning beds—now come with severe warning labels. Yet football remains a beloved national pastime. On, as the saying goes, any given Sunday, stadiums, bars, and living rooms are filled with screaming, enthusiastic fans who watch NFL players take hit after hit after hit. We now know about the long-term traumatic effects of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), yet the football industry, for the most part, has not changed.  

Surprisingly, that’s the undercurrent of the new FX series American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez. By now everyone knows the tale: The New England Patriots tight end died by suicide in 2017 while serving a life sentence for the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd. Now, the tragic tale gets the Ryan Murphy treatment. Based on the 2020 podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez And Football Inc., the 10-episode series follows Hernandez (Josh Rivera) from his time as a high-school sports star to his days playing college ball for the University of Florida with Tim Tebow (Patrick Schwarzenegger) to his career with the Pats. Hernandez was always getting into trouble, and no one seemed to care as long as he was winning games. The win-at-all-costs mentality prevailed. After he busts his ankle, Patriots coach Bill Belichick (Norbert Leo Butz) tells him that he needs to go from “injured to just hurt.”

Murphy is an incredibly busy TV producer. This month alone, he has four new shows premiering. And he has a lot of modes: There’s freakish Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story and his upcoming Grotesquerie), bombastic and campy Ryan Murphy (Glee), and over-the-top Ryan Murphy (9-1-1 and his upcoming Doctor Odyssey). But sometimes viewers are treated to a more nuanced Ryan Murphy with shows like The Boys In The Band, Normal Heart, and American Crime Story. With the latter, Murphy has been able to take criminal cases that have permeated our collective pop culture and offer a new perspective and understanding.

And that’s just what happens here. Does Aaron Hernandez being sexually abused as a child justify his crimes? Of course not. Does the traumatic and sudden death of his demanding father when he was 15 years old justify it? No. What about his repressed homosexuality? Nope. But these things, along with this battering of concussions he took over the course of his career, all serve to give context and offer not an explanation or defense but a more compassionate point of view. 

The series treats much of which has been gossip and rumor as fact. He was acquitted of killing Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado after an altercation in a Boston nightclub, but the series assumes that he committed these murders. Although there’s never been an established motive for Lloyd’s killing, the show provides one. At the end of each episode, American Sports Story reminds viewers that “certain characters, characterizations, incidents, locations and dialogue were imagined or invented for the purposes of dramatization.” The dramatic license taken makes a story that has been told many times—not just in the podcast on which the project is based on but in docuseries like Netflix’s Killer Inside: The Mind Of Aaron Hernandez and Apple TV+’s The Dynasty: New England Patriots—new again. We already know most of the facts of Hernandez’s career and downfall, but American Sports Story forces viewers to look at the familiar from a different angle.  

Although it is being billed as the first installment of the American Sports Story franchise, this new series could have just as easily been called American Crime Story: Aaron Hernandez. The slight switch of the title feels important because, in many ways, the series puts the football industry on trial. “I don’t know how to be around the team,” Hernandez tells his girlfriend.  “Why can’t you just be yourself?” she asks. “They don’t want that,” he replies. As they approach the NFL draft, one player remarks, “Now I know why they call this shit a slave auction.” 

As the heart of the series, Rivera, who gained 30 pounds for the role, captures the living juxtaposition that was Hernandez, who was both a fun-loving prankster with a shy smile and sweet demeanor (he who proposed to his girlfriend with a Ring Pop) and also a guy who made a lot of bad choices, with a simmering rage he lived with that consistently boiled over. 

Viewers don’t have to understand football to understand this story. It’s the action off the field, the politics, and that aforementioned winning-at-all-costs mentality that drives it. Tom Brady (Ross Jirgl), the Patriots’ most famous player, is barely seen. Rob Gronkowski (Laith Wallschleger), the tight end that was drafted the same year as Hernandez, makes a brief appearance as the goofball he is known for being. And Deion Branch, who lived across the street from Hernandez and who figured prominently in the Hernandez episode of Dynasty, is not featured at all. 

Many of Murphy’s go-to directors, writers, and producers like Paris Barclay, Maggie Kiley, and Steven Canals are employed here. Canals’ deft direction of the series’ eighth episode, simply titled “Odin,” is haunting. That said, at times, the script is a little too on the nose. “He’s going to end up in the Hall of Fame or prison,” one character says in the third episode. 

Rivera is buoyed by a strong supporting cast. Mendez, who won a Tony this year for Merrily We Roll Along, is fantastic as Hernandez’ cousin Tanya, a loving mother figure who was also not the best influence. Ean Castellanos shines as Hernandez’s brother DJ, who also has a love for football but not as much talent. As Hernandez’s fiancée Shayanna Jenkins, Jaylen Barron helps us understand why she remained steadfastly loyal. Meanwhile, Thomas Sadoski makes Hernandez’s agent Brian Murphy one of the few folks who tried to help the player or at least see him as more than just a cash cow. As Aaron’s narcissistic and unstable mother Terri, Tammy Blanchard might just make your heart break for Aaron. And although he appears in only one episode, J. Alex Brinson makes Odin more than just a footnote in Hernandez’s story. 

All in all, American Sports Story makes Hernandez a fully-developed person. Here, he’s not a total monster but also not a total victim (of his upbringing, background, bad choices, or an American institution that didn’t look out for or protect him). Does this portrayal get at the truth, the heart, of who he really was? That is, thankfully, mostly left up to the viewer to decide.    

American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez premieres September 17 on FX