‘American Sports Story’ Compellingly Tracks the Rise and Fall of Aaron Hernandez

Though the new Ryan Murphy-produced mini-series about disgraced football player Aaron Hernandez (premiering on FX on September 17) is titled American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, it would easily fit in with Murphy’s American Crime Story series, among deep dives like The People v. O.J. Simpson and The Assassination of Gianni Versace. All three are looks at the terrible confluence of fame and murder, charting sensational downfalls and attempting to map the pathologies of both the perpetrator and the sociocultural conditions that put him on the course to ruin.

The Hernandez saga, delineated here by writer Stu Zicherman, is a compellingly bleak one: a rising NFL star is accused of multiple murders, while contending with personal demons related to repeated brain injuries and his tortured understanding of his sexuality. There is, sadly, a lot to mine here, which American Sports Story does with admirable compassion. This is not the story of an utterly remorseless monster—which may be why it is not being told on Murphy’s Monster anthology series—but of a young man subsumed by impulses largely beyond his control. The show is a damning look at both the football industry’s galling recklessness with regard to the health of its players and a destructive cult of masculinity.

It’s easy to see why Murphy was drawn to this particular case. Much of his producing work studies how gay identity responds to stimuli—erotic, oppressive, predatory—in various milieux. American Sports Story is predicated on the evidence that Hernandez was at least bisexual, but heavily suggests that he was mostly attracted to men. This desire was anathema to a kid who was raised by a bigoted, abusive father, and who is so deeply immersed in the hyper-macho world of his chosen sport. The show views Hernandez’s sexuality as a tragic impossibility; the only escape from this suffocating prison—coming out and living a completely different life—is one that Hernandez never truly allows himself to consider.

Of course, we don’t know what was actually happening inside Hernandez’s mind when he committed his alleged crimes, and he’s no longer around to tell us. (Hernandez hanged himself in prison in 2017.) But the show does a convincing job of extrapolation, building out a ten-episode arc that credibly assesses the general idea of things. The season travels forward and backward in time, as is a seeming prerequisite of shows like this, but mostly keeps pushing ahead, early triumphs giving way to the calamity of violence.

For the bulk of the show’s run, Hernandez is played by Josh Andrés Rivera, a musical theater guy who here darkens his actorly shine to effectively communicate Hernandez’s internal storm. He’s alternately sweet, charming, haughty, wrathful, frightening. It’s a thorough and carefully considered performance, as tenderly convincing in romantic interludes as it is scarily palpable during moments of outburst. It is, in many ways, the role of a lifetime, an opportunity to explore extremes of the human experience that Rivera seizes with controlled gusto.

He is surrounded by a strong supporting cast, including Jaylen Barron as Hernandez’s longtime girlfriend Shayanna, and a host of New York theater actors, all of whom are terrific (Lindsay Mendez, Tony Yazbeck, Norbert Leo Butz). The standout is probably Tammy Blanchard as Hernandez’s mother, Terri, who is both victim and enabler, a woman leaning on her son to deliver the family out of lower-middle-class Connecticut life while also yearning, genuinely, for his happiness and autonomy. Blanchard keenly renders that conflicted spirit, how loyalty and encouragement can curdle into something like exploitation.

All of this fine acting could be better supported by the writing. Zicherman does a competent, workmanlike job of sussing out what ailed this doomed celebrity. The issues are presented plainly, the criminal incidents depicted with an unsensational frankness. That directness is appreciated in part; too much stylistic fussiness might have undermined the cramped, pressure-cooker psychology that the show is trying to capture. But I also would have appreciated a little more artfulness, either of the visual variety (the show looks pretty drab and gray) or in more complex and nuanced portraits of its characters.

One of the pleasures of O.J. Simpson and Gianni Versace is their sprawl, the way both series took time to delve into the inner lives of the people surrounding their respective subjects and investigated their position in recent history. This care helped create the sense that those shows were not just about some discrete, albeit high-profile, killing. They were instead diagnostic of something vaster, something perhaps terribly and uniquely American. There was a heft there, which is missing in ASS’s narrower purview.