By the time Aaron Hernandez (Josh Rivera) points the gun at Odin Lloyd (J. Alex Brinson) in the eighth chapter of FX’s American sports storyWe understand exactly how he got here. What might have seemed like a shocking act out of nowhere in 2013, when the NFL superstar was first arrested for killing his friend, feels, after seven episodes of meticulous backstory, like the culmination of a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances and worse choices. It’s no less horrific, and no more justifiable. But it’s more explainable.

What remains unclear, however, is exactly why we’re reliving all of this in the first place. The Ryan Murphy-produced American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez — planned as the first season in an ongoing anthology à la American crime story or American horror story — is well-cast, carefully researched, and conscientious in avoiding the temptation to sensationalize an already grisly case. But without a fresh angle to tell the story, or new insights to add, the show still struggles to shake the feeling that it’s just staring down 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.who has already done a fine job of laying out the facts and background of Hernandez’s case. If you are already familiar with that (or perhaps with the six-part Boston Globe feature that was released at the same time, or even the unrelated 2020 Netflix documentary The Killer Inside: The Ghost of Aaron Hernandez), there’s not much to be gained by watching the dramatized version of the story. If you’re not, you can probably look them up now and digest much of the same information in less time than it would take to watch these 10, 44-minute episodes.

But for those who do opt for that perspective, Zicherman dutifully lays out all the pertinent details. There’s the troubled childhood with a father (Vincent Laresca) who can be affectionate one moment and violently domineering the next, and the grief over the loss of 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 gazing wistfully at a skyline can earn a man an F-slur. There’s his not-unrelated involvement with the hardened criminal element of his Connecticut hometown, and his increasing dependence on drugs, from marijuana to painkillers to angel dust.

And of course there’s football. American sports story is at its sharpest when it comes to the impact the sport has had on Aaron, for good and (mostly) for ill. Scene after scene shows Aaron hazy and disoriented after being hit on the field, foreshadowing the severe brain damage that would be found after his suicide at age 27. Off the field, he’s simultaneously coddled and warped by the sports establishment — first college football, then the NFL — who don’t seem to care much what he does to himself or others, as long as his incredible athleticism keeps making them money.

Often, Aaron avoids the consequences of impulsive and violent behavior. But this indifference works the other way, too. One of the season’s most striking images is a long line of men, mostly black and brown, waiting to be weighed in at the NFL scouting combine. Despite the fact that they’ve all been invited on the basis of their extraordinary talents—and despite the fact that many of them, Aaron included, are destined to become singular superstars—the impersonal process reduces them all, in that moment, to interchangeable commodities.

American sports story isn’t lacking in dramatic narrative detail; Hernandez’s real-life story ensures that. The script doles out those twists at a brisk pace — brisk enough to keep us from getting bored but patient enough that even sports-ignorant viewers like me can understand how each domino falls into the next — and the cast is more than up to the challenge of finding the nuance in characters who could easily be 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 unselfconscious performance captures Aaron’s terrifying fickleness and desperation as ably as he does his charm, his best weapon is a broad, ineradicable smile. Early on, it gives Aaron a hint of sweetness, even innocence, to counter the hardened man his father, his profession, and his society demand of him. Later, as the gulf between his inner turmoil and his gilded public image widens, it’s that grin — rarer and more strained, but occasionally still genuine — that reminds us that beneath the brutal rage lurks not a monster, a victim, or a symbol, but a human being.

The cast around him is packed with familiar-but-not-too-familiar faces, like recent Tony nominee Lindsay Mendez (as Aaron’s loyal-to-a-fault cousin), Tammy Blanchard (as Aaron’s duplicitous mother), and Norbert Leo Butz (as the famous, or maybe infamous, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick). Jaylen Barron is so heartbreaking as Aaron’s troubled fiancée Shayanna that I briefly wished for a version of this saga told entirely from her perspective. The same goes for Ean Castellanos, who 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 so often the case with true crime reenactments, I’m left with the nagging question of where all this incredible effort and talent actually went – ​​where American sports story thinks he is fueling the debate by repeating these sordid details.

It’s not a renewed sense of empathy for the victims. Though Brinson seems magnanimous, Odin only appears in one episode; he’s gone almost as soon as we meet him. Aaron’s other supposed victims—i.e., the two men he’s supposedly shot in 2012—get even less attention. Nor does the show pretend to offer any new perspective on the forces that shaped this story. It’s certainly responsible for the show not to blame Aaron’s sins on anything other than the precise combination of history, chemistry, and luck that made Aaron who he was. But a more pointed focus on the culture of football, or the toxic masculinity that permeated the air he breathed, might have given Aaron’s story a gravitas beyond the specific horrible things that happened here.

Perhaps all it asks for is a little sympathy for the not-quite-devil who committed these crimes – except that at this point it seems like anyone inclined to feel sorry for Aaron already has plenty to chew on, and anyone who doesn’t will probably only be more irritated by the sympathetic treatment he gets here. A decade doesn’t seem like nearly enough distance to reflect on how much our understanding of Aaron or the culture around him might have changed.

What we’re left with is a show that turns real people’s pain into little more than fodder for entertainment — entertainment that at least tries to give a more humanistic sheen to its grim fascination, sure, but entertainment nonetheless. In that sense, maybe American sports story is not all that different from the industry it claims to criticize.