With the NFL season kicking off this weekend, you can expect to see some TV commercials for the new FX series “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez.”
The TV show, produced by Ryan Murphy, is a drama based on “Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc.,” the podcast from the Boston Globe and Wondery, and is based on the investigative reporting of the Globe’s Spotlight Team.
In the series, which is on several critics’ lists of the most anticipated TV series of the fall, actor Josh Andrés Rivera plays Hernandez, the former Patriots tight end who was convicted of murdering Odin Lloyd in 2015. (Hernandez was only 27 when he committed suicide two years later in the state’s maximum-security Souza-Baranowski prison.)
The 10-episode series premieres on FX on September 17 and streams on Hulu the next day.
The show traces the ups and downs of Hernandez’s life, from Bristol, Connecticut, where he was a standout high school football player, to the University of Florida, where he helped the Gators win the 2009 national championship, to the North Attleboro home where he lived with his fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins, and the couple’s daughter when he was arrested for Lloyd’s murder.
The FX series examines the role that severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), Hernandez’s insecurities about his sexuality and his rampant drug and alcohol use may have played in the football player’s decline.
In the series, actor Patrick Schwarzenegger plays Tim Tebow, Hernandez’s teammate at the University of Florida, who tried – mostly unsuccessfully – to keep the talented receiver on the straight and narrow. Former Patriots coach Bill Belichick, played in the series by veteran stage actor Norbert Leo Butz, also plays an important role in the Hernandez saga.
Rivera, who plays Hernandez, appeared in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” and “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.”
Mark Shanahan can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @MarkAShanahan.
