2 out of 5

Created by: Stu Zicherman

covers season 1: American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez

Biopics must always walk a line between entertainment and fact. Undoubtedly there’s a story there that someone valued, but in the translation to big or small screens, determining how to maintain that value – and maybe depending on who’s footing the bill – can lean the final product towards the hagiographic, or the salacious. And between those extremes, it’s still a matter of turning what’s generally not a traditionally structured story (since it’s reality) into something with a beginning, middle, and end, or even little iterations of that when you’re serialized. This inherent falseness tends to make it not a favorite genre of mine, but I respect the skill it takes to find the balance of all of this. And even when you’re making something more glowing or devious, it can be leaned in to a certain way where it still works. Through all of it, though, we still have the general ask we make of media: distract me. If it’s too easy for me to tell that you’re waiving a biopic wand to make this thing happen, it’s a lot easier for me to tune out.

I’m not here to say what is or isn’t true about the first season of the next “American…” anthology series – American Sports Story – which tracks Aaron Hernandez’s progress from college sports to the NFL, and then a murder charge, and his death from suicide, as creator Stu Zicherman and various writers and producers work within the tone and style of the Ryan Murphy co-produced world of these shows to try and tell / suggest the Whys of Aaron. I am here to critique how effectively I was swayed (or distracted) by that telling, which, unfortunately, wasn’t much.

Mostly it’s that last bit above: Hernandez’s tale, from the facts, already has the big “highs” that make for a “good” media story, and it’s understandable why that would be a good target for this series, as well as fodder for TV explorations of character. Josh Andrés Rivera is fantastic as Aaron, portraying a person caught between the very external world of sports and an internal world that existed with very little outlet; there’s a smaller scale version of this that zeroes in on that. But then there are all the other aspects of the story that are required to get to the murder and his death, and Sports Story struggles to properly divvy that up episodically while keeping Hernandez as sympathetic, and making the (essentially) cameos of other recognizable names – Patrick Schwarzeneggar’s Tim Tebow; Norbert Leo Butz’s Bill Belichick – as more than glorified impressions. While the acting sincerely holds most of that up, the pace falls into a sort of greatest hits flow, which unfortunately boils the more interesting study of Aaron into a very surface level “oh, it’s because of his head injuries;” “oh, it’s because he was a closeted homosexual” set of checkboxes, spaced up into a highlight reel of games and known incidents. So we end up just periodically cycling through these points, without much evolution to them, until we get to our inevitable conclusion.

To the show’s credit, it does avoid treating this all in a more overblown fashion; there is care in sifting through the history of very real people. At the same time, the imbalance of the approach ends up not doing it justice and can make it feel exploitative. Unlike some of the best versions of dramas from within the “American…”-verse – particularly the O.J. Simpson season of American Crime Story – American Sports Story’s first season doesn’t necessarily make us reassess what we knew, or, if new to the story, encourage any deeper dive. The intentions are there, as told by some excellent performances and clear attempts to moderate the tone, but it’s like it got casually remixed to be something a bit punchier and flashier, resulting in an ultimately shallow show.