FX's 'American Sports Story' reexamines the rise and fall of Aaron Hernandez
The latest installment of Ryan Murphy’s hit “American Story” franchise centers on the former football superstar who was convicted of murder in 2015.
Nearly a decade after Aaron Hernandez was convicted of killing semi-professional football player Odin Lloyd, the boyfriend of his fiancée’s sister, in a highly publicized trial, the former New England Patriot is getting the limited-series treatment in a new installment of Ryan Murphy’s buzzy “American Story” franchise.
Based on the Boston Globe and Wondery podcast “Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc.” and adapted by Stuart Zicherman, “American Sports Story,” which premieres Tuesday on FX, chronicles Hernandez’s meteoric rise to NFL superstardom and his stunning fall from grace after his arrest and eventual conviction of first-degree murder in 2015. Days after being acquitted in a second trial on charges of shooting two men in a car near a Boston nightclub, Hernandez died by suicide inside a Massachusetts maximum security prison in 2017.
“We tend to, in our culture, label people as one thing. Aaron Hernandez was a monster, a killer — and that’s just the way people talked about him. But no one’s born a monster or a killer,” Zicherman told NBC News.
“American Sports Story” attempts to contextualize the events leading up to Hernandez’s violent crime, Zicherman added, while raising larger questions about the complicity of a “sports-devouring” culture that enables bad behavior by protecting top athletes from being held accountable for their actions.
“If it weren’t for our desire to see people that we like win, they wouldn’t feel so brazen in their actions,” said Josh Andrés Rivera, who plays Hernandez from age 16 until his death at 27. “I think it’s important to watch the show with the lens that there’s some societal culpability in how these things happen and how people contribute to the making and breaking and the rise and fall of different prominent figures.”
Rating: 5