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A two-hour special on the downfall of former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez will kick off the new season of ID’s football-themed true crime series “Murder Under the Friday Night Lights.”
“Aaron Hernandez and the Untold Murders of Bristol” will premiere Jan. 8 at 9 p.m. ET/PT, ID president Jason Sarlanis announced during his panel at Content London on Thursday. New episodes of “Murder Under the Friday Night Lights” will then follow Wednesdays starting Jan. 15.
According to a press release, the new documentary special “delves into the tragic intersection of Aaron Hernandez with two of his high school teammates, Alex Ryng and Nicholas Brutcher, who, in a disturbing twist of fate, also went on to commit murder.”
The special will feature interviews with Hernandez’s childhood friend Alex Bradley, who was shot in the face by Hernandez, and Ernest Wallace, a family friend who was with Hernandez on the night Odin Lloyd was murdered. The press release states that the episode “reveals a chilling pattern of violence that began in Hernandez’s youth, carried throughout his football career and his affliction with a severe case of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), and culminated in his suicide in 2017.”
Popular on Variety During his Content London panel, Sarlanis — who also serves as president of TNT, TBS, TruTV and HLN at Warner Bros. Discovery — said that as the “Murder Under the Friday Night Lights” series went into Season 4, he asked the show’s producers: “How do we give this next season some topspin?”
Sarlanis — who was behind ID’s Emmy-nominated hit “Quiet on Set” — was originally hesitant when they pitched Aaron Hernandez, as the story “had been told a few times before” in a Netflix docuseries and, most recently, Ryan Murphy’s “American Football Story.” But his mind changed when he was shown a high school football photo of Hernandez “flanked by two other young men. And they said, ‘All three of these young men ended up being murderers.’”
Sarlanis continued, “Not only are they able to get incredible access, new archive and people willing to speak for the first time in the regular weekly series, they’ve outdone themselves with this documentary event.”
As the true crime genre has exploded, Sarlanis also touched on competition in the space with the likes of Netflix and others. “A few years ago, some big streamers i.e. Netflix got into that business and were aggressively overpaying for that content. And they will be the first to admit they wanted to dominate that space,” he said. “With the likes of David Zaslav behind us, I’ve been told point blank: ‘You need to get the hits, don’t let money get in the way.’ And so we’ve been going toe-to-toe with pretty much every other streamer and we’re competitive in that sense.”
Watch the trailer for “Aaron Hernandez and the Untold Murders of Bristol” below.
