Aaron Hernandez was football’s rising star – the big, fast, and tough receiver you couldn’t take your eyes off of. Played as a tight end, the name given to players who do dual roles on offense, blocking and catching passes, Hernandez quickly became the nation’s best player, winning the 2009 college championship with the University of Florida. After entering the NFL the following year at the tender age of 20, Hernandez evolved the tight end position from a backup to a starring role en route to reaching the Super Bowl and signing a $40 million contract extension. Ultimately, however, his penchant for self-destruction outweighed his talent for disrupting game plans. In 2017, Hernandez was found dead at age 27 while serving a life sentence for shooting a close friend who played semi-professional football. His spectacular fall from grace became the biggest media scandal since the OJ Simpson saga – so it’s no wonder that Hernandez also received the same treatment as Ryan Murphy.

Premiering this week is American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, a 10-part Murphy-branded miniseries chronicling Hernandez’s ill-fated sports stardom. Developed and produced by Stuart Zicherman, best known for his work on The Americans, American Sports Story is the first fictional take on the numerous journalistic projects that emerged following Hernandez’s suicide, days after he was acquitted of charges in an unrelated double murder. The series is based on a six-part newspaper series produced by the Boston Globe’s award-winning Spotlight investigative arm, which delves deeper into Hernandez’s harrowing childhood and difficult teenage years.

Two reporters from the Spotlight team join the sharply drawn project, which is made even more authentic by writers like NFL veteran-turned-TV commentator Domonique Foxworth — who not only played against Hernandez but championed him as a players’ union official. Highlights from Hernandez’s playing career, one of the perks of making a drama for a football television rights holder, lend the film additional credibility — but not enough to stop fans from criticizing actors for not looking exactly like their sports heroes. If Clipped, FX’s latest foray into sports-page storytelling, is any indication, Patrick Schwarzenegger won’t be able to avoid the jokes that his father, Mr. Universe, didn’t adequately prepare him for the role of football star Tim Tebow — even though the actor gets Tebow’s muscular Christian tics right.

Hunger Games star Josh Andrés Rivera is also believable enough in his role as Hernandez, especially when the focus is on this dark and brooding production – which is often. The close-ups are part of a larger attempt to give viewers a glimpse into Hernandez’s mind – the black box that caused him to vacillate between anger and paranoia and led him to turn to marijuana. Looking back on his college years, Hernandez is reported to have said, “Every time I was on the field, I was high on weed.”

It was only after Hernandez’s death and after his brain was donated to science that he was diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). The disease, which can only be identified posthumously, is the result of repeated blows to the head and is blamed for the deaths of high school-aged football players. When Hernandez’s brain was examined at Boston University, which houses the world’s largest CTE brain bank, researchers there diagnosed the most severe case ever found in a person his age – damage that must have contributed significantly to his difficulty making decisions, controlling his impulses and regulating his emotions.

CTE might have summed up Hernandez’s downfall – as it does for Chicago’s Dave Duerson, San Diego’s Junior Seau and other NFL legends – had Hernandez not left a suicide note to his prison lover. It opened the door to wild speculation about Hernandez’s possible inner torment as a man who did not acknowledge his bisexuality. After an investigative journalist outed Hernandez on a Boston radio sports show immediately after his death, his brother told Dr. Oz that the family fears he turned murderer to hide his secret sex life; Hernandez’s fiancée – also the mother of his only child, a daughter – insists he never disclosed his homosexual or bisexual tendencies to her. This project will almost certainly cause more suffering to his survivors.

Zicherman and company don’t just fill in the gaps in Hernandez’s sexual identity, they make it central to his character, using his family’s suspicions as cover for a broader critique of the inherent homoeroticism of male sports. Anyone who doesn’t dismiss this latest FX series out of hand as yet another product of the Hollywood agenda will be captivated by how deftly the series finds and incorporates the emotional moments along this athletic narrative arc. His complicated relationship with his physically abusive father (who died when Aaron was a teenager), the sense of abandonment he felt after being pushed out of college after serving his purpose, the dissociative episodes he goes through while interviewing with NFL teams — all of this reinforces the image of a truly lost soul, elevating Hernandez from a cautionary tale for sports to a tragic American myth.

Like football itself, American Sports Story is hard to watch. You wish things had turned out differently for Hernandez. It makes it clear: He was all but doomed.