Ryan Murphy and FX will tell an American Sports Story and an American Love Story
There's also a fourth season of American Crime Story in development, which could focus on Studio 54
The 2021 Television Critics Association summer press tour is underway, and we’re closing out the week with panels from FX on What We Do In The Shadows, B.J. Novak’s The Premise, and the fabled Y: The Last Man adaptation. There’s also the usual bounty of info, much of it relayed by the mayor of TV himself, FX Chairman John Landgraf in an executive session, and of course, breaking news. Today, FX announced that the American Story universe, which began its life with a focus on Horror (a journey that’s now in its 10th season) before moving on to Crime in The People V. O.J. Simpson and Versace, is expanding to include Love and Sports.
These two spin-offs will also be executive produced by the ACS brain trust: Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson. According to the synopsis, American Sports Story is “a scripted anthological limited series focusing on a prominent event involving a sports figure and re-examines it through the prism of today’s world, telling that story from multiple perspectives.” The first installment of American Sports Story (we’ll probably all have to refrain from using an acronym here) will be based on the podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez And Football Inc from the Boston Globe and Wondery. It will “chart the rise and fall of NFL superstar Aaron Hernandez and explores the connections of the disparate strands of his identity, his family, his career, his suicide, and their legacy in sports and American culture.” The Americans’ Stu Zicherman is writing the series. Executive producers also include Hernan Lopez and Marshall Lewy of Wonder and Linda Pizutti Henry and Ira Napoliello of The Boston Globe.
As for American Love Story, that scripted anthology series casts an eye toward “sweeping true love stories that captured the world’s attention.” The series will kick off with a look at “the whirlwind courtship and marriage of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. What started out as a beautiful union for the young couple, widely regarded as American royalty, began to fray under the stress of the relentless microscope and navel gaze of tabloid media. The pressures of their careers and rumored family discord ended with their tragic deaths when his private plane crashed into the ocean on a hazy summer night off the coast of Massachusetts.” Alexis Martin Woodall will executive produce along with Murphy, Falchuk, Jacobson, and Simpson.
But that’s not all—FX also provided some info about a potential fourth season of American Crime Story that’s currently in development. The working title is Studio 54: American Crime Story, and it will tell “the saga of Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager who in 1977 turned their midtown Manhattan disco into an international mecca of nightlife for the rich and famous and commoners alike—renowned for its lavish parties, music, sex and drugs. With Rubell and Schrager’s meteoric rise came their epic fall less than three years later when the impresarios were convicted of tax fraud.”
That’s a lot of Stories, and that doesn’t even include American Horror Stories, which wraps its first season later this month. In the meantime, look for Impeachment: American Crime Story, which premieres Tuesday, September 7 at 10 p.m. ET on FX.