As Aaron Hernandez (Josh Rivera) in the eighth chapter of FX’s American sports historywe understood exactly how he got here. What seemed like a shocking act out of the blue in 2013, when the NFL superstar was first arrested for killing his friend, feels like the culmination of a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances and even worse decisions after seven episodes of careful backstory. It’s no less horrific, and no more justifiable. But it’s more explainable.

What remains unclear, however, is why we are experiencing all of this again. The Ryan Murphy-produced American Sports History: Aaron Hernandez — planned as the first season of an ongoing anthology à la American crime history or American Horror Story – is well cast, carefully researched and scrupulously resists the temptation to overhype an already sensational case. But without a new angle on the story or new insights, the show still struggles to shake the feeling that it’s simply staring back at yet another infamous tragedy.

Ironically, part of the problem might be that the source material is too good. Creator Stuart Zicherman adapted his series from the 2018 podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc.which has already done a very good job of laying out the facts and background of Hernandez’s case. If you are already familiar with it (or perhaps the six-part Boston Globe parallel feature film or the independent Netflix documentary from 2020 The Killer Within: The Ghost of Aaron Hernandez), it’s not very educational to watch the dramatized version of the story. If not, you can probably look it up now to digest much of the same information in less time than it would take to watch those 10 episodes of about 44 minutes each.

But for those who still buy into that version, Zicherman painstakingly lays out all the relevant details. There’s the difficult adolescence with a father (Vincent Laresca) who could be loving one moment and violently dominant the next, and the grief of losing that same father when Aaron was just 16. There’s Aaron’s secret struggle with his homosexuality in an environment so oppressively macho that even looking too wistfully at a skyline can get you f-faced. There’s his not-so-unrelated dealings with the hardened criminal elements of his Connecticut hometown, and his increasing addiction to drugs from marijuana to painkillers to angel dust.

And of course there is football. American sports history is at its sharpest when it looks at the impact of sports on Aaron, for better and (mostly) for worse. Scene after scene shows Aaron dazed and disoriented after being hit on the field, foreshadowing the severe damage to his brain he would suffer after committing suicide at age 27. Off the field, he is simultaneously coddled and twisted by sporting institutions—first college football, then the NFL—that don’t seem to care much about what he does to himself or others, so long as his incredible athletic ability continues to make them money.

Often, this manifests itself in Aaron avoiding any consequences for his impulsive and violent behavior. But this indifference works the other way, too. One of the most striking images of the season is a long line of men, mostly black and brown, waiting to be weighed at the NFL Scouting Combine. Although each of them has been invited because of their exceptional talents—and although many of them, including Aaron, are destined to become unique superstars—the impersonal process reduces them all to interchangeable commodities in that moment.

American sports history is not lacking in dramatic narrative detail; Hernandez’s true-life story ensures that. The scripts dole out these twists at a reasonable pace – brisk enough to keep us from getting bored, but patient enough for even a sports-illiterate viewer like me to understand how each domino falls into the next – and the cast is more than up to the challenge of finding the nuance in characters that could easily have been reduced to archetypes.

Rivera, best known for his supporting roles in West Side Story And The Hunger Games – The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakesis impressive in his first leading role. While his uninhibited performance expertly captures Aaron’s frightening volatility and desperation as well as his charm, his best weapon is a wide, uncontrollable smile. At the beginning, it gives Aaron an aura of sweetness, even innocence, to contradict the hardened man his father, his job and his society want him to be. Later, as the gap between his inner turmoil and his golden public image widens, it is that grin – rarer and more strained, but still occasionally sincere – that reminds us that beneath the brutal anger lies not a monster, not a victim, not a symbol, but a human being.

The cast around him is packed with familiar but not-so-familiar faces like recent Tony nominee Lindsay Mendez (as Aaron’s fiercely loyal cousin), Tammy Blanchard (as Aaron’s unreliable mother) and Norbert Leo Butz (as famous or perhaps infamous New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick). Jaylen Barron is so heartbreaking as Aaron’s distraught fiancée Shayanna that I briefly wished for a version of this saga told entirely from her perspective. Likewise, Ean Castellanos, as Aaron’s big brother DJ, fills every minute of his screen time with a complicated mix of tenderness, protectiveness and resentment.

But as is often the case with true crime reenactments, I am left with the nagging question of what all this incredible effort and talent was actually used for – what American sports history believes that by repeating these dirty details it adds something to the discussion.

It’s not renewed compassion for the victims. Although Brinson seems big-hearted, Odin only appears in one episode; he’s gone almost as soon as we meet him. Aaron’s other alleged victims—that is, the two men he is accused of shooting in 2012—are given even less attention. Nor does the series claim to offer a new take on the forces that shaped this story. It’s certainly responsible of the show not to pin the blame for Aaron’s sins on anything other than the precise combination of past, chemistry and luck that made Aaron who he was. But a more pointed focus on the culture of football, or the toxic masculinity that permeates the air he breathes, might have given Aaron’s story a gravitas that goes beyond the specific horrific things that happened here.

Perhaps all they’re asking for is a little sympathy for the not-so-diabolical person who committed these crimes – but it seems that anyone who wants to feel sorry for Aaron has enough to digest already, and anyone who doesn’t will probably only be further annoyed by the sympathetic treatment he receives here. A decade doesn’t seem nearly enough time to consider how much our understanding of Aaron or the culture around him might have changed.

So what we are left with is a show that turns real people’s pain into little more than entertainment material – entertainment that at least tries to give its lurid fascination a more human veneer, sure, but entertainment nonetheless. In that sense, perhaps American sports history is not all that different from the industry it supposedly criticizes.