American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez runs a predictable play
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Depends on whether you mean what the late Patriots star Aaron Hernandez did, or what was done to him. The former: felony assault, attempted murder, and murder. Committed against Hernandez, and all his brethren in the NFL: negligence, intimidation/witness tampering, and conspiracy…at minimum.
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The story
I've had questions about the necessity of American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez since the project got announced.
Aaron Hernandez's life, crimes, and death are a sprawling, dispiriting, messy story, and coverage of it to date has exposed the dysfunction in multiple institutions – but nothing in said story is much of a mystery. We know whodunnit, we know how he got away with it for as long as he did, we know what probably caused some of it (CTE), and we know who's probably never going to pay for any of it (the NFL).
It's a tragedy, and it's got some of the hallmarks of an epic, but despite the size and scale of Hernandez's downfall, it's not a complex tale. Bad choices, D-I athlete privilege, and concussions got people killed, and the only person who could tell us more is dead. I genuinely admire Murphy Falchuk LLC's willingness, in various iterations of the American [X] Story franchise, to pull apart and then reassemble a narrative we think we know into something else or something more, with a focus on the way bigotry – and particularly homophobia – warps people and the systems around them. I just didn't think the case had much "else" or "more" left in it.
And I can't say the first two episodes of Aaron Hernandez changed my mind on that.
Rivera as Aaron Hernandez, recreating an infamous photo. (Eric Liebowitz / FX)
There's not nothing here, mind you. Under the direction of Carl Franklin, the first two episodes create various atmospheres effectively, whether it's Hernandez's migraine-y perception of the world around him, the claustrophobically small kitchen table at which his volatile family eats dinner, or the visit to Urban Meyer's (Tony Yazbeck) vast and spotless home.
Yazbeck is excellent as the flinty, transactional coach of a legendary program, as is Vincent Laresca as Hernandez's father Dennis Sr. Laresca is obliged to disgorge several monologues illustrating the singular, exhausting way Being A Man is framed for Hernandez, and the way the NFL has framed it for generations of Americans; on paper, Dennis Sr. is off-putting, but Laresca's depiction makes him just another guy mangled by the system.
Other properties on the Hernandez case/s
Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez
I reviewed it on The Blotter Presents 129
the podcast by which AH is inspired, Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc.
I reviewed it in Blotter Brief 2
Relative newcomer Josh Andrés Rivera as Hernandez is carrying the heaviest weight, and he's great too. Hernandez is somewhat opaque to us at this distance, as he probably was to himself thanks to structural changes to his brain, but the story is named for him, and the audience has to care about him, or at least see something that makes us wonder what could have been instead. Rivera gets at an unformed, childlike quality in Hernandez that makes him very real, and sympathetic.
I wish I could say the same for the writing in the first two installments, which isn't bad, but is underlining as hard as it can the idea that Hernandez's attempts to bury or compensate for his attraction to men cost him his life, basically via risky hyper-masculine plumage display (skull-rattling play on the field; gang-adjacent associations off it). I don't disagree, and if the series goes on to argue that the entire culture of football from Pop Warner on up is complicit in Hernandez's death and dozens of others, I don't disagree with that either. But it isn't a new idea; that his experience of "success" felt anxiously shitty and isolating isn't new information.
I'll keep watching for a few weeks, to see if Aaron Hernandez finds a different gear or innovates on the basics of the plot the way American Crime Story S02 did. Testimony against homophobia, against the cannon-foddering of college athletes, against the impassive accountability deflection of the NFL is always of value, but Aaron Hernandez's story didn't change anything, and if the story-telling isn't changing things up either, I don't know if the whole season is worth your time.