Even if it’s new Ryan Murphy-A miniseries about disgraced soccer player Aaron Hernandez (premiering on FX on September 17) is called American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandezwould easily match Murphy’s American Crime Story The series, among the deep dive like The People v. OJ Simpson and The Assassination of Gianni Versace. All three focus on the infamous link between fame and murder, plotting provocative mistakes and attempting to map the perpetrator and the cultural conditions that set him on the path to ruin.
The saga of Hernandez, described here by the author This Zichermanit’s bleak and bleak: a rising NFL star is accused of multiple murders, as he wrestles with personal demons related to repeated brain injuries and his tortured understanding of his sexuality. There is, sadly, a lot to go into here, viz The Story of American Sports it does with wonderful compassion. This is not the story of a monster with no remorse—which may be why it’s not being told at Murphy’s. A monster an anthology series—but of a young man controlled by emotions most of which he could not control. The show is a chilling look at the football industry’s negligence of player health and destructive masculinity.
It’s easy to see why Murphy was drawn to this case. Much of his creative work studies how the gay identity responds to stimuli – provocative, oppressive, invasive – in various contexts. The Story of American Sports relies on evidence that Hernandez was at least heterosexual, but suggests that he was more attracted to men. This desire was an insult to a child raised by a violent, abusive father, who immersed himself in the hyper-macho world of his chosen sport. The show views Hernandez’s sexuality as tragically impossible; the only way out of this suffocating prison—to get out and live a completely different life—is one that Hernandez doesn’t allow himself to think about.
In fact, we do not know what was really going through Hernandez’s mind when he committed his crimes, and he is not about to tell us. (Hernandez hanged himself in prison in 2017.) But the show does a convincing job of extrapolation, building a ten-part episode that explores the general idea of things. The season goes back and forth in time, as seems to be the need for programs like this, but often continues to progress, the first victory giving way to a tragedy of violence.
For the majority of the show, Hernandez is played by Josh Andres Riveraa musical theater guy who here dims his theatrical brilliance to communicate effectively with Hernandez’s inner storm. She is alternately sweet, charming, arrogant, angry, and intimidating. It’s a vivid and carefully thought-out performance, as convincing to romantics as it sounds terrifying during the big explosions. It is, in many ways, a part of a lifetime, an opportunity to explore the extremes of human experience that Rivera captures with controlled intensity.
He is surrounded by a strong support base, including Jaylen Barron as does Hernandez’s ex-girlfriend, Shayanna, and several New York actors, all of whom are delightful (Lindsay Mendez, Tony Yazbeck, Norbert Leo Butz). The highlight is probably Tammy Blanchard like Hernandez’s mother, Terryboth victim and helper, a woman who relies on her son to rescue the family from Connecticut’s low-class life while longing, in truth, for her own happiness and independence. Blanchard conveys that spirit of conflict powerfully, how loyalty and encouragement can prevent something like extortion.
All this good action can be better supported by text. Zicherman does a good, career-like job of demystifying what troubled this doomed celebrity. The stories are presented in a vivid manner, crime scenes depicted with unmistakable clarity. That directness is partially appreciated; too much stylistic debate can undermine the narrow-minded, pressure-cooker the show is trying to capture. But I would also have appreciated more aesthetics, either in the visual variety (the display looks nice and blue) or in the complex and ambiguous images of its characters.
One of the pleasures of OJ Simpson and Gianni Versace it’s their breadth, the way both series took time to delve into the lives of the people around their subjects and investigate their place in recent history. This attention helped create the impression that the shows were not just for ignorant, even elite, killers. Instead it was an examination of something great, something potentially terrifying and uniquely American. There was a hole there, which was not there NOT‘s narrow purview.
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