Note: The following story contains spoilers from “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez” Episode 10.
Over the course of its 10 episodes, “American Sports Story” chronicled three murders, a grisly gunshot wound, Aaron Hernandez’s growing drug problem and several more harrowing scenes. Yet, perhaps the most upsetting moment of all happens in the final moments of Episode 10.
Instead of detailing another grisly scene, the FX drama ends with Jaylen Barron’s Shayanna watching a group of children play football. The more she watches them play, the more her smile falls as the weight of Aaron’s (Josh Andrés Rivera) creeps into her mind.
For series developer and executive producer Stu Zicherman, the question of how to end the show was always a hard one. “I didn’t want to end it in prison with Aaron. It felt too sad,” Zicherman told TheWrap. “We wanted to find a way to show this idea that the game continues to go on and that people like Aaron — and there are other players in the history of the game — are just forgotten. What happens is forgotten.”
Zicherman added that his own 12-year-old son plays football and has dreams of playing the game later in life. “It’s become America’s pastime,” he said. “And the game has never been bigger.”
That’s a difficult truth to swallow as “American Sports Story” is as much about the crimes Hernandez committed as it is about the pressures and tolls of the football industrial complex. The 10-episode series that includes Ryan Murphy, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson and Alexis Martin Woodall among its many executive producers never makes excuses for the late Hernandez. It shows him murdering Odin Lloyd and chronicles his resulting trial. The series also portrays Hernandez murdering Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado — the double homicide the real player was acquitted of — and shooting his friend Alexander Bradley.
Piece by piece, the drama examines Hernandez’s hairpin temper, internalized homophobia and difficult childhood, arguing these factors led to the tragic events that would later define both his life and death. But, especially in its final episode, the series also examines football itself. As conflicted as he was, the pressures of fame and the blunt force trauma of the sport never helped. Posthumously, the real Hernandez was diagnosed chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a revelation that has led to theories about how the condition may have affected his behavior.
“I want people to take the tragedy of it all away,” Zicherman said. “He wasn’t born a killer. Without forgiving him for what he’s done, it’s a tragedy.”
To underscore this story’s complexity, Zicherman and his team opted to use clips of real sport commentators reacting to Hernandez’s CTE diagnosis. The news only came out after Hernandez’s suicide when researchers at Boston University studied Hernandez’s brain and discovered he was in stage 3 or 4. The progressive degenerative disease affect people who have suffered repeated concussions and has been linked to problems with cognitive, behavioral and emotional problems.
“The brain injury stuff played out in such an interesting way in real life. It really became a debate, whereas our entire show there wasn’t much debate about whether Aaron had killed these men or what he’d done or who he was,” Zicherman explained.
Originally, the plan was to write and cast actors for this montage, but that didn’t fully capture the weight of this particular issue. “The reason we decided to bring in real voices is because, in the sports world, those are really famous voices. Those are the pundits. Those are the chorus of people who are constantly commenting,” he continued. “This remains today an enormous debate inside of football: What are the dangers of playing? We thought it added more resonance if we used the real people.”
When he was searching for clips, Zicherman said the exercise was “powerful.” He discovered pundits for and against Hernandez as well as several who used the player’s death to talk about violence in football as a whole. But this cacophony of debate is ultimately the point of this entire show.
“It doesn’t matter. We are addicted to this game. We’re going to keep watching it no matter what,” Zicherman said. “So we just wanted to put a stamp on that.”
At the moment, “American Sports Story” hasn’t been renewed for a second season. But if it does get a greenlight, Zicherman and the producing team have started talking about other stories in world of sports that can “measure up” to this one.
“The big idea is a story, whether it’s a crime or an event or a person, that transcends sports so much that it makes a larger comment on society in general, which I think this show was able to do,” Zicherman said. “There have been some discussions. I think everybody’s waiting to see how this one does.”
