‘American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez’ Review: FX’s Ryan Murphy-Produced Drama Brings Little New Insight to an Infamous Crime

By the time Aaron Hernandez (Josh Rivera) points the gun at Odin Lloyd (J. Alex Brinson) in the eighth chapter of FX’s American Sports Story, we have been made to understand exactly how he got here. What might have seemed like a shocking act out of the blue in 2013, when the NFL superstar was first arrested for killing his friend, feels, after seven episodes of painstaking backstory, like the culmination of a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances and worse choices. It’s no less horrifying, and no more justifiable. But it is more explicable.

What remains unclear, however, is precisely why we’re reliving all of this in the first place. The Ryan Murphy-produced American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez — planned as the first season in an ongoing anthology à la American Crime Story or American Horror Story — is well-cast, carefully researched, and scrupulous in avoiding the temptation to sensationalize an already lurid case. But without a fresh angle to cast on the tale, or new insights to add to it, the show nevertheless struggles to shake the sense that it’s simply gawking at an infamous tragedy all over again.

Ironically, part of the problem might be that the source material is too good. Creator Stuart Zicherman has adapted his series from the 2018 podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc., which already did a plenty fine job of laying out the facts and the background to Hernandez’s case. If you’re already familiar with that (or perhaps with the six-part Boston Globe feature published in tandem with it, or even the unconnected 2020 Netflix documentary The Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez), there’s not much to be gained from watching the dramatized version of the tale. If you’re not, you could probably look them up now to digest much of the same information in less time than it would take to watch these 10 44ish-minute installments.

But for those who’ve nevertheless chosen this take, Zicherman dutifully lays out all the pertinent details. There’s the difficult youth with a father (Vincent Laresca) who could be affectionate one moment and violently domineering the next, and the grief of losing that same father when Aaron was just 16. There’s Aaron’s secret struggle with his homosexuality amid an environment so oppressively macho that even staring at a skyline too wistfully might get a guy slapped with the f-slur. There’s his not-unrelated falling in with the hardened criminal elements of his Connecticut hometown, and his increasing dependence on drugs from marijuana to painkillers to angel dust.

And of course, there’s football. American Sports Story is sharpest when it’s considering the sport’s influence on Aaron for good and (mostly) for ill. Scene after scene shows Aaron bleary and disoriented after getting hit on the field, foreshadowing the severe damage that would be found in his brain after his death by suicide at 27. Off the field, he’s simultaneously coddled and warped by athletic institutions — first college football, then the NFL — that don’t much seem to care what he does to himself or others, so long as his incredible athletic ability continues to make them money.

Frequently, this plays out as Aaron avoiding any consequences for impulsive and violent behavior. But this indifference works the other way, too. One of the most striking images of the season is a long line of men, mostly Black and brown, waiting to get weighed at the NFL scouting combine. Despite the fact that each and every one of them has been invited on the basis of his extraordinary talents — and despite the fact that many of them, including Aaron, are destined to become singular superstars — the impersonal process reduces them all, in that moment, to interchangeable commodities.

American Sports Story does not lack for dramatic narrative details; Hernandez’s real-life story assures that much. The scripts dole out those turns at a smart pace — brisk enough to keep us from getting bored, yet patient enough that even sports-ignorant viewers like myself can grasp how each domino topples into the next — and the cast is more than up to the challenge of finding the nuance in characters that might have been easy to reduce to archetypes.

Rivera, best known for his supporting roles in West Side Story and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, is impressive in his first leading turn. While his unself-conscious performance captures Aaron’s frightening volatility and desperation as capably as it does his charm, his best weapon is a broad, irrepressible smile. Early on, it gives Aaron an air of sweetness, innocence even, to contradict the hardened man that his father, his profession and his society demand he become. Later, as the gap continues to widen between his inner turmoil and his golden public image, it’s that grin — rarer and more strained, but still sincere now and then — that reminds us that beneath the brutal fury is not a monster, nor a victim, nor a symbol, but a human being.

The cast around him is stuffed with familiar-but-not-too-familiar faces like recent Tony nominee Lindsay Mendez (as Aaron’s loyal-to-a-fault cousin), Tammy Blanchard (as Aaron’s unreliable mother), and Norbert Leo Butz (as famous, or perhaps infamous, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick). Jaylen Barron is so heartbreaking as Aaron’s distressed fiancée Shayanna that I briefly wished for a version of this saga told entirely from her perspective. Likewise Ean Castellanos, who as Aaron’s big brother DJ fills every minute of his screen time with a complicated mixture of tenderness, protectiveness and resentment.

But as is so often the case with true-crime reenactments, I’m left with the nagging question of what all this incredible effort and talent has actually gone toward — of what American Sports Story thinks it’s adding to the conversation by rehashing these sordid details.

It’s not a renewed sense of empathy for the victims. Though Brinson makes a big-hearted impression, Odin appears in only one episode; he’s gone almost as soon as we’ve met him. Aaron’s other presumed victims — i.e., the two men he’s alleged to have shot in 2012 — are paid even less attention. Nor does the series purport to offer a fresh take on the forces that shaped this story. It’s surely responsible of the series to resist pinning the blame for Aaron’s sins on anything but the precise combination of history, chemistry and luck that made Aaron who he was. But a more pointed focus on the culture of football, or the toxic masculinity saturating the very air he breathed, might have granted Aaron’s tale a gravitas to extend beyond the specific awful things that happened here.

Perhaps it’s asking only for a bit of sympathy for the not-quite-devil who committed these crimes — except that it seems at this point that anyone who’s inclined to feel bad for Aaron has plenty to chew on already, and anyone who’s not will likely be only more irritated by the understanding treatment he gets here. A decade does not seem nearly enough distance for us to reflect on how much our comprehension of Aaron or the culture around him might have changed.

What we’re left with, then, is a show that turns the pain of real people into not much more than fodder for entertainment — entertainment that at least tries to put a more humanistic sheen on its lurid fascination, sure, but entertainment nonetheless. In that sense, perhaps American Sports Story is not so very different from the very industry it purports to critique.