The drama surrounding Aaron Hernandez is gently spreading through the NFL

In the third episode of American sports historyAaron Hernandez (Josh Rivera) – a star tight end for the Florida Gators – receives the John Mackey Award. At the ceremony, he is introduced to the award’s namesake (Martin Fisher), an NFL Hall of Famer who, like so many players before him, suffered from dementia after retiring. As a caregiver helps Mackey get up from his wheelchair to pose for a photo, the camera slowly pans from his face – which shows a confused, slightly blank expression – to Hernandez, whose smile radiates youth and promise.

Eight years later, in 2017, Aaron Hernandez hanged himself in his prison cell after being sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Odin Lloyd (J. Alex Brinson). An autopsy revealed that 27-year-old Hernandez had suffered severe brain damage known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – a condition that can lead to “aggressiveness, explosiveness, impulsivity, depression, memory loss, and other cognitive changes” – due to repeated head injuries he sustained during his college and professional football career.

Created by Stuart Zicherman (The Americans) and based on the podcast Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc., American sports history (premieres September 17 on FX) challenges the prejudices and hardened opinions about Hernandez and the crimes he committed. The gritty, relentlessly sad miniseries attempts to humanize the New England Patriots tight end as a troubled young man struggling with a past of abuse, internalized homophobia and sports institutions that treated his body like a commodity. While Sports history does not absolve Hernandez of all blame—nor should it—but misses the opportunity to harshly rebuke the NFL for its role in the player’s downfall, which it deserves.

Aaron and his brother DJ (Ean Castellanos) grow up in Bristol, Connecticut, training for football careers under their father Dennis (Vincent Laresca), a violent and controlling tyrant who also frequently clashes with the boys’ mother, Terri (Tammy Blanchard). At his father’s urging, Aaron plans to play for the University of Connecticut like his older brother – but when Dennis unexpectedly dies, Aaron begins to consider offers from other eager football applicants, including Urban Meyer (Tony Yazbeck), the successful and charismatic coach of the Florida Gators.

Inexperienced, easily dazzled and hungry for approval from male authority figures, Aaron is no match for the clever sales pitches and shiny, often empty promises of the coaches and talent scouts trying to lure him into their programs. Nor does he benefit from the Gators’ culture of no consequences – which includes employing a retainer-based lawyer, Huntley Johnson (Jeffrey Nordling), to keep players’ run-ins with the law from becoming public knowledge.

The Hernandez saga could well fall under the American crime history Banner; instead, it is the first in a new sports-related expansion from Executive Producer Ryan Murphy’s American History franchise. Perhaps the goal is to expand the audience beyond true crime fans, but for curious football fans, it’s worth noting that Hernandez isn’t drafted by the National Football League until halfway through the 10-episode season. Zicherman spends the first four episodes exploring the self-destructive cycle that begins to consume Aaron’s life: At work, he’s brutally physically (and verbally) beaten on the field, leaving him frustrated and looking for a way out. He turns to drugs and hangs out more frequently with his dealer, Alexander Bradley (Roland Buck III).

Although he’s engaged to his high school sweetheart Shayanna (Jaylen Barron), Aaron can’t ignore his attraction to men – including Chris (Jake Cannavale), a kind-hearted physical therapist. The resulting guilt and shame over these secret relationships lead him to push himself even harder at games, causing even more devastating damage to his brain and body. Sports history portrays this toxic cocktail – Hernandez’s insecurity and immaturity, drug-induced paranoia, and devotion to an organization that wanted him on the field at any cost – as the cause of his downfall. Rivera captures the boyish charm and goofy charisma of Hernandez’s public persona while also giving his moments of doubt and impulsive anger a disturbing power.

None of the big-name football stars who had a hand in Hernandez’s career — including Meyer, Patriots owner Robert Kraft (Jerry Levine) and the team’s legendary head coach Bill Belichick (Norbert Leo Butz) — emerge unscathed. The NFL and college football industries are portrayed as uncompromising institutions run by rich men who see their players as little more than profit margins. Yazbeck delivers a stellar performance as Meyer, whose paternal warmth and magnetism turns to icy indifference once Aaron Hernandez is no longer of any use to his program. The only people who treat Hernandez with any degree of humanity are his agent Brian Murphy (the always welcome Thomas Sadoski) and Patriots quarterback Tim Tebow (Patrick Schwarzenegger, practically boring).

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Sports history is especially compelling when it focuses on the football industrial complex itself – which it doesn’t do enough. The fourth episode gives viewers an all-too-brief glimpse of the annual NFL Scouting Combine, where representatives from all 32 teams evaluate college prospects on a series of physical and mental challenges. As a long line of shirtless players wait to be weighed, measured and otherwise judged in front of an audience, one Black athlete turns to another and scoffs, “Now I know why they call this a slave auction.” It’s one of the few overt mentions of race in the NFL, and the obviously uncomfortable optics of (mostly) white owners overseeing a league with a majority of non-white players.

Oddly, the series also downplays the NFL’s long and controversial history with CTE. While viewers frequently see Aaron’s obvious side effects from the head trauma – a high-pitched ringing in his ears, moments of memory loss, blurred vision – Sports history fails to explore the subject in depth. At one point, a television in a character’s hospital room shows a story about the NFL’s $765 million settlement with injured players in 2013, and the show devotes only a few minutes to the shocking results of the neuropathological study of Hernandez’s brain.

To be fair, the NFL, which was not involved in the creation of the Sports historywill probably not love this show. But for an anthology franchise that has been so successful at exposing the larger societal and circumstantial factors behind scandalous true crimes in the past – systemic racism and sexism (The People v. OJ Simpson), marginalization of the LGBTQ community (The assassination of Gianni Versace), unbridled and irresponsible media sensationalism in politics (Impeachment proceedings) — Sports history takes a surprisingly ambiguous stance on the league’s role in Hernandez’s downward spiral.

Maybe the producers and FX didn’t want to upset the NFL, an organization that once got ESPN to cancel its own football drama because it didn’t like the way it portrayed the players. Or maybe Sports history The team did not want to give the impression to much sympathy for Hernandez, who remains the most reviled and ridiculed player in the NFL since Orenthal James Simpson. But without a concise point of view, American sports history is little more than a successful retelling of another American tragedy, this time about a broken young man surrounded by people who fail him – almost as horribly as he himself fails them. Grade: B