Alison Herman TV Critic The limited series “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez” is the first of six series from executive producer Ryan Murphy to air this month, and the third Murphy project to center on elite athletes mired in tabloid scandal. “American Sports Story” — don’t you dare make it an acronym! — joins “American Horror Stories” as well as “American Crime Story” in riffing on the anthology format Murphy helped popularize.
The first season of the latter show centered on O.J. Simpson, while the upcoming installment of “Monsters” on Netflix will focus on the Menendez brothers, including teen tennis star Erik.
Based on the reported podcast from the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team and production company Wondery, “American Sports Story” can feel circumscribed by all these predecessors and precedents.
Created by Stuart Zicherman (“The Americans,” “The Affair”), the 10-episode season sometimes struggles to put its own stamp on a highly publicized story that hews closely to longstanding Murphy-verse themes.
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