The TV show, executive produced by Ryan Murphy , is a drama based on “ Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc. ,” the podcast from the Boston Globe and Wondery that’s drawn from the investigative reporting of the Globe’s Spotlight Team .
With the NFL season kicking off this weekend, you can expect to see some TV ads promoting the new FX series, “American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez.”
The show, which makes several critics’ lists of the most-anticipated TV shows of the fall, stars actor Josh Andrés Rivera as Hernandez, the former Patriots tight end who was convicted in 2015 of murdering Odin Lloyd. (Hernandez was just 27 when he died by suicide at Souza-Baranowski, the state’s maximum security prison, two years later.)
The 10-episode series premieres Sept. 17 on FX and begins streaming on Hulu the next day.
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The show chronicles the highs and lows of Hernandez’s life, from Bristol, Conn., where he was a standout high school football player; to the University of Florida, where he helped the Gators win a national championship in 2009; to the North Attleboro house where he lived with his fiancee Shayanna Jenkins and the couple’s daughter at the time of his arrest for Lloyd’s murder.
The FX series explores the role that severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), Hernandez’s uncertainty about his sexuality, and his rampant drug and alcohol use may have played in the football player’s downfall.
In the show, actor Patrick Schwarzenegger plays Tim Tebow, Hernandez’s University of Florida teammate who tried, mostly without success, to keep the talented pass-catcher on the straight and narrow. Former Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who’s played in the series by veteran stage actor Norbert Leo Butz, also figures prominently in the Hernandez saga.
Rivera, who plays Hernandez, has appeared in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” and “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.”
Mark Shanahan can be reached at mark.shanahan@globe.com. Follow him @MarkAShanahan.