Originally, the Aaron Hernandez season of “American Sports Story” was envisioned to be another installment of “American Crime Story.” That changed when the team behind it started talking about launching a sports-centric spinoff to the FX franchise. Showrunner and executive producer Stu Zicherman immediately knew the Hernandez case would be the perfect story for this new saga.
“This story some people will think of as a sports story. I think it’s an American story, because it speaks to big themes about violence, toxic masculinity, sexuality, how we extol our athletes and put them on a pedestal and then, when they do something terrible, we just throw them out,” Zicherman told TheWrap.
Whether it be “American Horror Story,” “American Crime Story,” “American Sports Story” or the upcoming “American Love Story,” a through-line of these series is that their themes and ideas transcend their central story to reflect “the larger fabric of American culture,” Zicherman said.
“From the very beginning when we started doing ‘American Crime Story,’ we wanted to do a series that held a mirror to the viewer and to American culture. That’s the reason we started with ‘The People vs. OJ Simpson,'” executive producer Brad Simpson told TheWrap. “We wanted to take something that you knew from the tabloid headlines, go behind the scenes and show what it was like to walk in the shoes of very flawed individuals as they intersect with complicated systems of power.”
But as the series has evolved, the team wanted to move away from stories that solely focused on crime.
“I think with Aaron Hernandez as the inaugural sports story season, it really does that,” Simpson said. “If you’ve heard about the story, you’ve probably only heard of the tabloid elements. But actually, when you get underneath it, this is a guy who was not born a murderer. He had many people along the way who aided and abetted what would become a disastrous end to his life.”
Around the mid 2000s and into the 2010s, Aaron Hernandez was a football darling. While at the University of Florida, Hernandez was part of a team that earned All-American honors, and he was considered to be one of the best tight ends in the country. Despite concerns over his past and size, Hernandez was drafted as a fourth round pick for the New England Patriots in 2010. Three years later, his life and legacy came crashing down when Hernandez was arrested for the murder of Odin Lloyd. In the aftermath, the Patriots cut Hernandez, and he went through a lengthy legal battle while two other murders and a shooting connected to Hernandez came to public light. In 2017, Hernandez was found dead in his cell, his death ruled a suicide.
When it came to telling this story, the “American Sports Story” team had to walk a difficult tightrope. On one hand, childhood abuse, homophobia, racism, overwhelming media attention, exploitative people in his life and brain injuries caused by the very sport that made him famous contributed to this very sad story. On the other, the series was careful to never be too sympathetic to Hernandez.
“There were many off ramps at which people could see the direction he was heading in. But then his performance was so incredible on the field that there was no intervention off the field,” executive producer Nina Jacobson told TheWrap. “That is a tragedy. Ultimately, his actions belong to him. He is responsible for his actions.”
“We took the approach that Aaron is a killer. We don’t forgive him for that,” Zicherman said. “But by the same token, no one’s born a murderer … This is one of those unique cases where you can kind of track what went wrong, and it wasn’t all his fault.”
The first season of “American Sports Story” is based on “Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez & Football, Inc.” — a podcast and series of articles that were created in 2018 by the award-winning Boston Globe Spotlight Team. Even when reporters were investigating this story, they had a difficult time determining how sympathetic they should be to Hernandez.
“When we were doing a deep dive into this, we were constantly wrestling with how much sympathy or compassion we had for him, when you consider all the damage and the killings that he did do,” Patty Wen, who served as the editor of the Spotlight Team during the investigation, told TheWrap.
This balancing act was also something actor Josh Rivera kept in mind when it came to portraying the football star. To prepare for the role, Rivera studied the Boston Globe’s reporting as well as public interviews of Hernandez.
“I tried not to completely copy or imitate [Hernandez], because at the end of the day, it’s not a documentary. This is inspired by true events,” Rivera told TheWrap. “I wanted to make sure that, if there is a correct way to do it, that we were doing it correctly. Because something the show does well is that it doesn’t let Aaron off the hook … It’s my job as an actor to look at the research, to look at this role and to have empathy for this character.”
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