Aaron Hernandez was football’s shooting star—the big, fast, tough receiver you couldn’t take your eyes off. Deployed as a tight end, the name for the players who pull double duty on offense, both blocking and catching passes, Hernandez quickly became the nation’s best receiver, winning a collegiate championship in 2009 at the University of Florida. After entering the NFL the following year at age 20, Hernandez helped elevate the tight end position from a complementary to a headliner role en route to reaching the Super Bowl and signing a $40 million contract extension. Ultimately, though, his propensity for self-destruction proved greater than his talent for wrecking game plans. In 2017, Hernandez was found dead at age 27 while serving a life sentence for fatally shooting a close friend who played semi-pro baseball. His spectacular fall from grace became the biggest media scandal since the OJ Simpson saga – so it’s no wonder Hernandez has also gotten the Ryan Murphy treatment.

This week marks the debut of American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez – a 10-part Murphy-branded limited series chronicling Hernandez’s star-crossed sports fame. Created and executive produced by Stuart Zicherman, best known for his work on The Americans , American Sports Story is the first fictional treatment to follow the slate of journalistic projects that sprang up after Hernandez was found dead by suicide, days after he was acquitted of charges in an unrelated double homicide. The show is based on a six-part newspaper series produced by the Boston Globe’s award-winning Spotlight investigative department, which delves into Hernandez’s troubled upbringing and troubled teenage years.

Two Spotlight reporters join the sharply drawn project, made more authentic by writers including NFL veteran and TV analyst Domonique Foxworth—who not only played against Hernandez but also advocated for him when he was an executive with the players’ union. Highlights from Hernandez’s playing career, one of the perks of making a drama for a football television rights holder, lend him further credibility—but not enough to stop fans from picking apart actors for not looking exactly like their sports heroes. If Clipped, FX’s latest foray into stories ripped from the sports pages, is any guide, Patrick Schwarzenegger won’t escape the jokes about his Mr. Universe father failing to properly prepare him for the role of football hunk Tim Tebow—even if the actor does a good job of portraying Tebow’s muscular Christian tics.

Likewise, Hunger Games breakout Josh Andrés Rivera makes himself believable enough as Hernandez, especially when the focus on this dark, brooding production tightens—as it often does. The close-ups are part of a larger attempt to put viewers inside Hernandez’s head—the black box that drove him from rage to paranoia, leading him to escape into marijuana. Looking back on his college days, Hernandez reportedly said, “Every time I was on the field, I was high on weed.”

It wasn’t until after Hernandez died and his brain was donated to science that he was diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE; the disease, which can only be diagnosed postmortem, results from repeated blows to the head and has been blamed for the deaths of football players as early as high school. When Hernandez’s brain was examined at Boston University, home to the world’s largest CTE brain bank, researchers diagnosed him with the most severe case ever found in a person his age — damage that is believed to have contributed significantly to his difficulty making decisions, controlling his impulses and regulating his emotions.

CTE might well have summed up Hernandez’s downfall—as it does for Chicago’s Dave Duerson, San Diego’s Junior Seau, and other NFL legends—if Hernandez hadn’t left a suicide note to his prison sweetheart. That opened the door to a frenzy of speculation about Hernandez’s possible inner torment as a secret bisexual man. After an investigative reporter outed Hernandez on a Boston sports talk show shortly after his death, his brother told Dr. Oz that the family feared he had become a murderer to cover up his secret sex life; Hernandez’s fiancée—and the mother of his only child, a daughter—claims that he never expressed homosexual or bisexual desires to her. The project will almost certainly cause more anguish for his survivors.

Zicherman et al 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 a cover for a broader critique of the inherent homoeroticism of male sports. Those who aren’t ready to dismiss FX’s latest series as just another product of the Hollywood agenda will be intrigued by how cleverly it finds and infuses the emotional beats along this athletic storyline. His complicated relationship with his physically abusive father (who died when Aaron was a teenager), the sense of abandonment he feels after being expelled from college after serving his purpose, the dissociative episodes he experiences during interviews with NFL teams—all reinforce the image of a truly lost soul, elevating Hernandez from sports cautionary tale to tragic American myth.

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