‘American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez’ Review: A Clichéd, Lurid Afterschool Special Despite an Excellent Performance from Josh Rivera

After dramatizing some of our time’s most sensational collisions of news, entertainment and culture stories, it’s not surprising that it would be executive producers Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk to be the ones to bring us one of the most notorious, if not most salacious, American story of the 21rst century so far, and yet perhaps the one that best encapsulates the American experience, in all its glory and tragedy. American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez is a spinoff of the American Story anthology series, and tells the horrible tale of a professional football player’s rise and fall, and paints the picture of his life, offering up potential explanations for how someone who, had the world at his feet, could end up hanging at the end of a rope in a prison cell.

The life and death of Aaron Hernandez is still quite fresh for most of us who follow sports, especially those of us who lived through the heyday of the Patriots dynasty in the first decade of this century, so there was certainly an anticipation to see how creator Stuart Zicherman, who also wrote all ten episodes, based on a podcast from the Boston Globe, would approach Hernandez’ story, considering its many nuances—and potential pitfalls.

In the previous installments in the American Story series, The People vs O.J. Simpson, The Assassination of Gianni Versace and Impeachment, each series examined real-life true crime stories and dramatized them from various perspectives, each one telling the same based-on-a-true-story, but giving the audience different angles, points of view and voices, making each journey for the audience a multi-faceted and often complex one. The problem with American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez is there are no other perspectives and no other stories to tell. Because of this, the series turns out to be one long slow-motion single car crash, with no respite from the impending doom, or distraction from the literal head-pounding misery.

The anguish begins right from the outset, as we see Aaron and his brother as kids, sitting at a quintessential middle-class family dinner table, their father berating Aaron for not being good enough at something. You have to be better, you have to be stronger, he bellows! Their mother yells, the boys wince, and here we go. The audience instantly understands: the seeds of toxic masculinity are sown here, we get it now. But the hammer keeps pounding that nail, over and over: the abusive father, the ineffective mother, the pressured kid. We’ve seen it a million times. It may all have been real, but there’s no imagination in its portrayal here.

Ditto to the rest of the series, which plays out like a standard sports biopic, hitting each milestone in Aaron’s life, played as an adult by Josh Rivera (West Side Story), using uniform colors and jersey numbers to help mark key moments in his life. He wins awards, dates his high school sweetheart, wins the college championship, gets an agent, gets drafted by his hometown NFL team, scores touchdowns, scores a big contract, signs a million autographs, making sure to check off every sports movie cliché along the way. Football fans will be disappointed with how few actual football scenes there are, with most of them archival footage, and the few scenes created for the show designed to show the brutality of the sport, not highlight its glory.

But this series is not interested in the glory of being Aaron Hernandez anyway. It revels in his darkness, amplifying it like a ‘90s Afterschool Special. He was deep in the closet, severely ashamed of being gay, thinking he was attracted to men because he was abused by a babysitter as a child. Aaron’s self-loathing, combined with his father’s liberal use of the f-word and persistent homophobia in the football locker rooms caused Aaron to dive even deeper into self-medication, an addicted marijuana user. Add to this the beginning stages of brain damage caused by football, which would later be revealed to be CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), and Hernandez would lash out with a terrible temper, often for little reason. His lifelong friendship with gang members from his hometown of Bristol, Connecticut gave Aaron easy access to guns and drugs, and he was in trouble early and often, despite his success on the football field. Moving away to Florida for college proved to be a quick fix, especially when he became fast friends with born-again teammate Tim Tebow (a perfectly bland Patrick Schwarzenegger), who got him (briefly) on the straight and narrow, but Florida coach Urban Meyer (a perfectly sleazy Tony Yazbeck) still didn’t trust that Hernandez could stay out of trouble and basically kicked him out and, as chance (and bad luck, as it turned out) would have it, it turned out to be Hernandez’ hometown team, The New England Patriots, coached by Bill Belichick (a perfectly lifeless Norbert Leo Butz) who drafted Hernandez, keeping Hernandez close to home, which ended up certainly hastening his demise (see previous hometown bad influences).

The story is interesting, and the various “cameos” by famous names in the sports world is fun—alas, no Tom Brady—but the majority of the air in these ten episodes of television are sucked up by a man’s misery and his desperate attempt to escape from himself, and once the filmmakers run out of new ways to show that, it gets pretty dreary and repetitive. There’s only so many joints we can watch a guy light and so many ways we can watch a guy explode with anger for different reasons. Rivera’s portrayal of Hernandez is generally excellent, but he is seriously reduced ninety percent of the time to playing him like a cartoon about to blow his top. If there ever were a human version of “HULK SMASH!,” Aaron Hernandez would be it. The problem is, there’s no Bruce Banner to balance it.

The hardest part is Rivera is good—really good. When we are able to see the charming moments of Hernandez, and there are a few, they are really breathtaking, as is his million-dollar smile. We understand how he was so popular and beloved, more than just as a sports star. There are great moments, like when he plays opposite Ean Castellanos, who plays Aaron’s brother and Jaylen Barren, who plays Aaron’s fiancée, Shayanna, who are both excellent, but most of Rivera’s scenes are Aaron battling his own internal demons, and that gets old really quickly, no matter how good an actor you are. There is zero actual character development, a true disservice to Rivera’s potential.

And that’s the biggest problem with this series. There are very serious issues at play here, from CTE to self-loathing to abuse to institutionalized homophobia to addiction and murder, and this series could have offered a great opportunity to further conversation about any number of issues, but the filmmakers instead spend most of their time focused on the titillating, lurid gossip fodder elements of Aaron’s story, the clickbait, if you will. Let’s be honest, we’re not watching the Junior Seau story for a reason. We’re watching the Aaron Hernandez story because it’s seamier. It’s good television.

Packed nightclubs, drugs and fistfights? Check. Cruising in bathrooms? Check. Awkward fumblings in front seats of pickup trucks? Check. Shame, abuse, drugs, guns, sex, violence, murder, it’s all here, and it’s all just so lurid, that’s the only word for the whole vibe of this series: lurid. Sure, there were other players with CTE, there were other players with troubled pasts, there were other players who were closeted, but there aren’t any shows about them. Only Hernandez hits the jackpot with a story that can be told this salaciously and, trust me, it does. No need to get sidetracked with anything as boring as a conscience.  

The series does try to find its soul in its final episode though, titled, “Who Killed Aaron Hernandez?,” which, in another universe and a different vision could have been the title of this series. It is in this final episode where the series does find its redemption, in a way, when Aaron’s brother and fiancée beg his mother (played by Tammy Blanchard) to allow an autopsy of Aaron’s brain after his death, saying, “We have to make sense of this.” We are all left to make sense of the circumstances of Aaron Hernandez’s life, his choices, and the many explanations for his actions, and whether he should be seen as a victim, as a monster, or both. There is a careful distinction between offering excuses and offering explanations and the series offers neither, but gives the audience enough information to allow their own interpretation of a life and events. The final two episodes do make an effort to further a conversation into the larger issues that should have been delved into in a deeper way, but it feels too little, too late.

Even at the end, when the series is attempting to rescue its soul, it continues to suffer from over-simplification and borderline mockery, like the brief moment when a scientist, looking at a slice of Hernandez’ brain after his death, gasps dramatically, exclaiming, “Jesus!,” or when Aaron meekly asks his lawyer, who he just found out was gay, “Did something happen to you,” revealing that we’re supposed to believe he’s never actually had a conversation with another gay man until that point in his life? It feels like these serious topics, that deserve serious discussion, are used as nothing more than tent poles for a peep show instead, taking advantage of a story’s high tabloid quotient to make a lurid, juicy melodrama rather than a layered, textured story about a man’s battle against his demons and a conversation starter about the failure of the institutions, people and society around him.

Aaron Hernandez was the poster boy for the American dream, but he was also the poster boy for toxic masculinity, still a pervasive problem in our society, and there are so many elements to him that deserved to be explored in a deeper way, as a character and as a person, not just as simply a victim or a murderer. He didn’t deserve much, but this story–and its reflection on American society as a whole– deserved more than this overly sensationalized, cookie-cutter biopic that wastes a great opportunity and will have a hard time finding any audience that will take it seriously. And that is perhaps the biggest waste of all.

Grade: D

The limited series American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez premieres September 17 at 10pm ET and then is available to stream the next day on Hulu, with new episodes weekly.