How do you begin to tell the story of Aaron Hernandez? To many fans of the late New England Patriots tight end, there’s a simple answer: You don’t. After all, not even a decade has passed since April 19, 2017, the day 27-year-old Hernandez was found dead in his prison cell at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts. In the time since, numerous pieces of media have offered insights into the troubled life leading up to the first-degree murder charge that landed him there, including a Boston Globe Spotlight Team investigation that turned into the acclaimed podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc .
In 2020, Netflix dropped its own documentary, entitled Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez . The Hernandez story even became grist for the mill of comedy during the roast of Hernandez’s old teammate, Tom Brady , earlier this year. However, casting famous Broadway actors and dramatizing the events onscreen feels bigger and riskier, especially over the course of ten hour-long episodes following Hernandez from his childhood to his death — especially with Ryan Murphy onboard as an executive producer.
When this first season of American Sports Story was announced, social-media reactions were understandably mixed; for starters, people asked, what makes Hernandez’s life an “American sports story” and the O.J. Simpson trial an “American crime story”? (The difference, maybe, is that Hernandez was still playing when everything went.