American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez puts football on trial
The FX show looks at the player’s notorious downfall from a different angle
Josh Rivera as Aaron Hernandez (Photo: Eric Liebowitz/FX)
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.