Executive producers of the new FX series say it’s not only the story of a notorious football player but also a ‘mirror back to us as a country.’
In 2009, superstar tight end Aaron Hernandez helped the Florida Gators win a national championship. In 2012, Hernandez played in a Super Bowl for the New England Patriots and signed a $40-million contract extension.
But that same year he was investigated in connection with a double homicide. A year later he shot Alexander Bradley, one of his best friends, through the eye and murdered another man, Odin Lloyd. Two years later, Hernandez was convicted of Odin’s murder, and in 2017 Hernandez killed himself while in prison.
Those are the headlines of Hernandez’s brief and violent life and death, the details that reach beyond the die-hard football fan and create a hard-to-shake image in popular culture. While Hernandez clearly had drug problems, committed violent crimes and grew increasingly paranoid, his fuller story is a complicated one: Hernandez suffered physical abuse in a violent and dysfunctional family; was sexually abused as a boy; felt compelled by society’s strictures to hide his homosexuality; was chewed up and spit out by college football’s powers-that-be; and his brain was severely damaged, resulting in chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, that likely affected his behavior.
“It had this deep reporting that we love to have in our shows, and we started developing the series with an eye toward it being part of our different franchises about the culture of America,” he says.
Simpson says fellow executive producer Ryan Murphy loved that this was a story about “a person with a fractured identity, as so many of our shows are.”
The reporting revealed a story that was “far more heartbreaking and complex than I had considered,” says Nina Jacobson, another executive producer. “When you think you know a story and then you come across something deeply reported, that really changes how you see it [and] that always makes me stand up at attention.”
She adds that since football is our national religion, Hernandez’s rise and fall “was not just the story of one person but a mirror back to us as a country.”
Numerous writers were interested in tackling the tale but the producers chose Stuart Zicherman because of his résumé — Simpson cites “The Americans” — but also because he is a passionate football fan who nonetheless has the emotional distance to see the damage the game can wreak on people. Simpson says Zicherman had a compelling pitch about the intersection of celebrity, sports, sexuality and masculinity.
“It’s character first and football second, and what made this story different from a million sports stories out there is the story about Aaron as well as his family, the people on his team and the coaches,” he says.
