How do you begin to tell the story of Aaron Hernandez? To many fans of the late New England Patriots tight end, there’s a simple answer: You don’t. After all, not even a decade has passed since April 19, 2017, the day 27-year-old Hernandez was found dead in his prison cell at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts. In the time since, numerous pieces of media have offered insights into the troubled life leading up to the first-degree murder charge that landed him there, including a Boston Globe Spotlight Team investigation that turned into the acclaimed podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc. In 2020, Netflix dropped its own documentary, entitled Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez. The Hernandez story even became grist for the mill of comedy during the roast of Hernandez’s old teammate, Tom Brady, earlier this year.
However, casting famous Broadway actors and dramatizing the events onscreen feels bigger and riskier, especially over the course of ten hour-long episodes following Hernandez from his childhood to his death — especially with Ryan Murphy onboard as an executive producer. When this first season of American Sports Story was announced, social-media reactions were understandably mixed; for starters, people asked, what makes Hernandez’s life an “American sports story†and the O.J. Simpson trial an “American crime story� (The difference, maybe, is that Hernandez was still playing when everything went down.) Setting aside that ontological question, does this particular story really call for a dramatization?
After one episode, that remains an open question. Regardless of Murphy’s actual level of involvement, Aaron Hernandez already feels very much like a Ryan Murphy take on this material, for better or worse. That means we shouldn’t come to this show with any real expectation of tastefulness or restraint. Hernandez’s crimes didn’t begin with the murder of Odin Lloyd, and the temptation to mine the past for warning signs is just too great, especially with the closeted angle. Showrunner Stuart Zicherman clearly intends to take advantage of this story’s lurid appeal — and to repurpose it as an exploration of a few key weighty themes.
But let’s start at the beginning. The series opens with a specific episode from Hernandez’s past, four months before the murder of Lloyd: the 2013 shooting of his friend Alexander S. Bradley, here credited as Alexander Sherrod (Roland Buck III). During a trip to Belle Glade, Florida, the two are partying at a strip club when Aaron (Josh Andrés Rivera) notices a pair of nearby men who might be watching them. He’s worried they’re plainclothes cops who followed him to Florida while investigating something that happened in Boston. (Spoiler alert for real life: It was a double homicide.)
When Sherrod later reminds him that he also knows all of Aaron’s secrets, it only exacerbates his paranoia, and suddenly Aaron’s friend is waking up from a nap with a gun aimed between his eyes. The shot doesn’t kill him, though. At a ceremony where Aaron accepts an Inspiration to the Youth award and celebrates his new $40 million contract, he gets a call from a ghost: Sherrod, who says he’s coming for him.
After that stranger-than-fiction setup, “If It’s to Be†travels back in time to deliver the typical childhood episode you’d expect for the premiere of a biographical series. We quickly grasp some basic facts: Aaron grew up in Bristol, Connecticut, with a chaotic Italian mother named Terri (Tammy Blanchard), a tough Puerto Rican father named Dennis (Vincent Laresca), and a competitive older brother named D.J. (Ean Castellanos). Already the football star of his high school, Aaron appears to have a bright future ahead of him. From a very young age, Dennis instilled in his sons a powerful drive to succeed in school and sports — but most importantly, he wants them each to be a man, a phrase that might become drinking-game-worthy after a few episodes.
It’s clear that Dennis frequently gets mean and violent with his sons and wife, though we don’t see the worst of the real-life man’s alleged abuses. He supposedly wants to keep D.J. and Aaron off the street and prevent them from getting mixed up in anything illegal, but he doesn’t understand just how much his intense pressure affects them. And he has an outsize level of control over Aaron’s life in particular, repeatedly turning away recruiters and insisting that Aaron play football at the University of Connecticut, where he played and where D.J. currently plays. After all, Aaron is a guaranteed four-year starter at Connecticut. It’s the sensible choice.
According to some people, like the boyfriend of Aaron’s cousin Tanya Singleton (Lindsay Mendez), Dennis’s helicopter parenting has left his son “soft†— an impression he desperately wants to correct in whatever macho way possible. Aaron’s overcompensation clearly stems from a struggle with his sexuality.
Ryan Murphy loves to base a project around a gay male murderer, and it’s obvious from very early on that this season will put Hernandez’s sexuality front and center. First, we see Aaron’s friend and teammate Dennis Sansoucie (Kalama Epstein) (and yes, his name is Dennis, too) touching his dick in the car, an encounter that later sparks a moment of intense anxiety when he thinks his deeply homophobic dad found out his secret. That core fear drives this TV version of Aaron Hernandez perhaps more than any one other motivator.
Aaron’s dad dies during hernia surgery not long after, but he’ll continue to live in his son’s head for years, as the opening scene showed. It’s his dad’s disgusted voice he hears when he and Dennis S. sneak off together; it’s his dad he’s aping when he abruptly breaks things off, telling Dennis he “can’t be no faggot.â€
All of this dialogue is pretty blunt, and I found myself rolling my eyes a few times at both the inspirational sports-movie clichés (“The best ones, they become heroes. They’re remembered forever.â€) and the overdone foreshadowing of the dark path Aaron will eventually go down. And every character seems set on telling Aaron about the man he can become and the man he must not become. That continues when Florida Gators offensive coordinator Steve Addazio (Scot Ruggles) finally convinces Aaron to meet legendary head coach Urban Meyer (Tony Yazbeck) and give Florida a try.
Like Aaron, Meyer lost a parent as a young man, and he sees the team as a family, recruiting players in which he can really invest his time and energy. Perhaps it’s that pitch that sells Aaron on UF, though his commitment comes at the expense of his brother, whose starting QB prospects in Connecticut rely on gaining a tight end of Aaron’s caliber. There’s also some more drama about his living situation; Aaron has been living with Tanya since finding out about his mom’s affair with her husband, and Terri wants to take care of him after he suffers a mild concussion on the football field during his senior year.
The real Hernandez was diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) after his death, unquestionably a result of repeated head trauma from playing football, and many have speculated about the role brain damage may have played in his erratic behavior. Here, we see Aaron completely ignore the doctor’s warning to stop playing football, drinking, and smoking, his worst instincts encouraged by his new friend Ernest “Bo†Wallace (Catfish Jean). It’s framed as one of the many tragic turning points when Hernandez’s friends failed him — and when he failed himself.
Before long, Aaron is gone from Bristol altogether, whisked away to Gainesville a whole semester early to participate in spring practice. Is he prepared to graduate, either academically or socially? Not really, no. However, the school principal suppresses his misgivings after Urban Meyer reassures him about the stability they could provide Aaron. Everyone just wants Aaron to capitalize on his potential, and they have no idea they’re nudging him closer and closer to tragedy.
“If It’s to Be†is far from a disaster; it’s a competent premiere in a lot of ways, I suppose, and well directed by Carl Franklin. But I’m also not sure the show has really justified its own existence yet. There’s a strong whiff of Lifetime corniness on display, and the discussions of race and sexuality feel surface-level and predictable at this point. Aaron Hernandez’s success will rest on where it decides to spend its time moving forward — whether it wants to dwell on salacious details and cobble together some contrived diagnosis for its subject or offer something deeper and less conclusive. Sometimes the best cure for exploitation is just better writing.
The End Zone
• This season is actually based on Gladiator, the podcast about Hernandez, which I’d recommend.
• I’m not 100 percent sold on Rivera’s performance yet, though I recall liking him in the new West Side Story. The man also has little resemblance to Hernandez, but he’s good at balancing Aaron’s smiley, happy-go-lucky exterior and the angry, insecure man lurking beneath.
• Sorry, Dennis Hernandez, but Scandal’s version of “we gotta be twice as good to get half as much†hit a lot harder.
• We only briefly glimpse Tim Tebow (Patrick Schwarzenegger), but we do meet Aaron’s love interest and future fiancée Shayanna Jenkins (Jaylen Barron). “Don’t play hard to get.†“I am hard to get.â€
• Aaron hallucinating his dad could get old pretty fast.