American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez has a lot of ideas about why the titular athlete’s life went the way it did, but that expansiveness is the root of the new series’ problem. The fourth iteration of FX and executive producer Ryan Murphy’s American Stories anthologies, it lacks the verve of early American Horror Story, and, more unfortunately, it’s missing the cultural specificity and societal interrogation of The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. Instead, the show plays out a bit like a Wikipedia page put on camera, with a few poignant moments and clever creative decisions to make it at least worthwhile along the way.
Hernandez’s story is a difficult one, and it’s brought to life by actor Josh Rivera (his first major role after notable supporting turns in West Side Story and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes). Raised in Bristol, Connecticut by an abusive father and a self-absorbed mother, Hernandez was an early athletic standout, and that talent was his ticket out of a life that others saw as destined for poverty and criminal activity. He joined the University of Florida under coach Urban Meyer (Tony Yazbeck), where he fell deeper into drug use and aggressive behavior, building a less-than-stellar reputation ahead of the NFL draft. Picked up by the Patriots, Hernandez’s professional career was successful but ultimately marred when he was charged and convicted of first degree murder for the killing of Odin Lloyd. Following a separate murder trial and public rumors about his homosexuality, Aaron committed suicide while in prison.
There are lots of things that could have led to Hernandez’s violence, and American Sports Story touches on all of them. Given that the series is based on The Boston Globe and Wondery’s comprehensive podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc., it makes sense that it tries to be as exhaustive as its source material—tries being the operative word. There’s a difference between reporting and storytelling, and American Sports Story doesn’t connect its dots the way it should. Hernandez’s latent sexuality, his drug problems, his history of abuse, and the increasingly obvious consequences of so many blows to the head as a football player all pop in and out of the story. These issues get individual attention, but they never coalesce.
At times, the camera work and sound design reflect Hernandez’s burgeoning chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the neurodegenerative condition that hundreds of other NFL players have been diagnosed with. In these scenes, it’s like Hernandez’s senses are rebelling against him, laying the groundwork for his breakdowns and outbursts, but the frequency of that creative choice is perfunctory at best. The CTE angle benefits from the series’ great work in depicting just how dangerous football is, with every tackle and rush punctuated with the sickening crunch of pads and bodies colliding. Even the supportive smacks from teammates reverberate through Hernandez’s skull, and you really get a feel for how his body keeps the score.
What’s far less successfully portrayed is Hernandez’s struggles with his sexuality. In the earlier episodes, he shares a tentative relationship with a fellow high school football player, something supposedly true to life. As the series progresses, though, an invented character, Chris (Jake Cannavale), becomes a male love interest. The invention isn’t a problem, but the inconsistency in Hernandez’s characterization that it brings about is. They go on a boys’ trip to Cabo and frequently make time to hook up; Hernandez has no qualms about exploring his sexuality, happy to keep this relationship going on the side while he has a girlfriend (Jaylen Barron) at home with a baby on the way. Yet, in the locker room, he’s hypersensitive to the homophobic jokes and speculations that his teammates throw around. Hernandez is simultaneously secure in his sexuality (even content sharing a years-long relationship with a man!) and scared of it; the show wants it both ways, even when it doesn’t make much sense.
Of course, we never see Hernandez grapple with this tension. Aside from the concussion and CTE camerawork, Hernandez doesn’t get much inward examination at all. As a character, he’s emotionally stunted and immature, and he doesn’t change very much over the course of the series’ ten episodes except to get worse. He’s a tragic figure, doomed by figures and institutions who only care about what he can do on the football field, but the show doesn’t lean into that enough. Some of the most compelling parts of the story come with Hernandez’s time at the University of Florida, which involved an early and unearned high school graduation and help to avoid jail time from the team’s de facto defense lawyer. Both Florida coach Meyer and Patriots coach Bill Belichick (Norbert Leo Butz) are essentially cartoon villains in this story, but it’s not all that far off from the truth.
In that sense, American Sports Story opts for broad strokes and broader performances that generally encapsulate Aaron Hernandez’s life. His coaches are cold and self-interested. The same can be said for his shrill and opportunistic mother (Tammy Blanchard, doing a distracting amount of acting), while his older brother DJ (Ean Castellanos) resents Aaron for being the athlete he wishes he could be. Cousin Tanya (Lindsay Mendez) doesn’t have a trait outside of her loyalty to Hernandez. Patrick Schwarzenegger appears as Tim Tebow to give middling youth pastor vibes, one of a few vague player impersonations throughout the series.
It’s all representative of the show’s lack of specificity, its inability to truly engage with the multiplicity of issues that plagued the clearly troubled Aaron Hernandez. The series is hardly actively bad, but it does little to distinguish itself as a story with something to say.
The first two episodes of ‘American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez’ debut on FX on September 17th.
