Stuart Zicherman didn't intend to have "American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez" absolve the late NFL player of his crimes, chiefly, the fatal 2013 shooting of his friend, Odin Lloyd. "Aaron's guilty of murder. He ruined people's lives and families' lives. And he should never be forgiven for that," the creator of the recently released FX drama anthology told Salon. And yet, despite Hernandez's wrongdoings, Zicherman caveated that his case is somewhat of a cautionary tale, a lethal cocktail that saw Hernandez's consistent lack of guiding authority figures crash headlong with a franchise that often views players as "commodities."

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With a lead performance by Josh Andrés Rivera of "West Side Story" and "The Hunger Games" prequel "The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes," the ten-episode series — which also saw "American Horror Story"'s Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk as executive producers — traces Hernandez's life as a fledgling phenom from Bristol, Connecticut through his collegiate career at the University of Florida and subsequent professional role as a tight end for the New England Patriots. It ultimately concludes with Hernandez's death by suicide while incarcerated in 2017, which many have speculated to have been a result of a severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — a degenerative brain disease found in many football players — and rumors about his sexuality.

While Zicherman did see space to indict the NFL and other people involved in Hernandez's life "a little bit," what he really wanted to explore in this iteration of "American Sports Story" was the immense pressure the athlete was under. "I think that he suffused a lot of his emotions and a lot of his fears. Being an NFL star brings all these things to a boil," Zicherman said.

Check out the full interview with Zicherman, in which he discusses dimensionalizing Hernandez, the player's immense paranoia, and "people and institutions" who may have healed a level of adjacent culpability.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What drew you to want to make a dramatized anthology series about Aaron Hernandez, and why now?

I'm a big football fan, and I knew the story, and I thought there wasn't that much more to tell. And then when the Boston Globe Spotlight team came out with their piece that was followed up by the podcast, they kind of re-broke the story and exposed certain elements of the story that I didn't know. And I figured if I didn't know, then the world didn't know. I always love telling a story that you think you know, but that you really don't know. And I thought that was a good reason to make the show, because it was so much more complex than it appeared. And Aaron was so much more complex than he appeared.

The why now is simply, I think that this story doesn't go away. Football and sports — especially football — have never been bigger in our country, and I think it's a good time to make a show that's both about this person, these crimes . . . But also this larger idea about sports in America, and how we raise our athletes up and turn them into heroes, and then the same way we tear them down when they do........

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