FXs Clipped Is a Fast-Paced, Fittingly Trashy Take on the Donald Sterling Scandal: TV

October 2024 · 8 minute read

You can’t really talk about “Clipped” without bringing up “Winning Time,” so we might as well get the comparison out of the way. The FX limited series bills itself as “the scandalous story of L.A.’s other basketball team,” nodding to the Clippers’ seemingly permanent second-banana status to the Lakers since their move to the city in 1984. Sure enough, the Lakers were first to get the prestige TV treatment, an HBO drama with a star-studded cast, Adam McKay as an executive producer and a dauntingly epic scope. (The series began with a flash-forward to 1992, then ended its first season in the spring of 1980.) “Winning Time” also ended abruptly, never getting the chance to finish its sweeping story of a decade’s worth of athletic dominance.

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“Clipped” lowers its ambitions, largely to its benefit. The series is constrained to just six episodes and a rapid, specific series of events: the 2014 release of a recorded conversation between Clippers owner Donald Sterling (Ed O’Neill) and his assistant/mistress/arm candy/“silly rabbit” V. Stiviano (Cleopatra Coleman), leading to Sterling’s ouster after the appalling racism expressed on the tape led to a massive outcry. In yet another instance of poetic overlap, the initial subject of Sterling’s ire was a photo Stiviano took with Magic Johnson, star of the ‘80s-era Lakers — and, yes, “Winning Time.”

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Adapted from the ESPN podcast “The Sterling Affairs” by showrunner Gina Welch, “Clipped” captures the end, or perhaps the always-present underside, of the dynamic largely celebrated by “Winning Time.” Both Sterling and longtime Lakers owner Jerry Buss were regional real estate tycoons in the Southland — objectively rich, but small-timers compared to the tech barons and ownership groups that would succeed them. (Literally, in the case of Sterling handing off the Clippers to ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for a cool $2 billion.) Buss is remembered as a maverick, a sharp-elbowed interloper who infiltrated the country club of NBA ownership and led the Lakers to victory. Sterling, now 90, is seen as a miserly monster who ran his team into the ground with active contempt for his employees. It’s always risky to subject an organization to the whims of one man; then again, some behaviors deemed tolerable in an earlier era don’t hold up in the harsh light of the present. Buss, too, was a notorious womanizer, though largely outside the earshot of an iPhone. He passed away in 2013, just a year before Sterling’s disgrace. 

“Clipped” tells a tawdry tale of sex, money, race and fame, and largely takes an appropriately soap-adjacent tone. To the extent this story has any heroes, Welch and her writers focus on Doc Rivers (Laurence Fishburne), the celebrated coach tasked with turning around the team’s fortunes against Sterling’s own best efforts. Rivers and his players — condensed to starters Blake Griffin (Austin Scott), Chris Paul (J. Alphonse Nicholson), DeAndre Jordan (Sheldon Bailey), Matt Barnes (Sarunas J. Jackson) and JJ Redick (Charlie McElveen) — are the most sympathetic victims of Sterling’s repugnant rant, forced into the impossible choice of either continuing to make money for a man who sees them as subhuman or sacrificing income and opportunity as a result of his actions. But the true conflict of “Clipped” is a tug-of-war between amoral-at-best operators as attuned to their own interests as they are blind to their failings: Stiviano, Sterling and Sterling’s wife Shelly (Jacki Weaver).

Besides the looming shadow of the Lakers, a tabloid frenzy in the world of Los Angeles sports inevitably conjures the specter of O.J. Simpson. In dramatizing the Simpson trial, the first season of “American Crime Story” deftly balanced the lowbrow elements of its story with its tragic, eternally resonant themes. “Clipped” is a little more lopsided. O’Neill is deliciously loathsome as a troglodyte whose bigotry and boorishness are so over the top you can’t help laughing. Rich Sommer and Kelly AuCoin add even more levity as the hapless minions trying and failing to clean up Sterling’s mess in real time, and Weaver gives Shelly a deceptive sharpness, adapting as her character does from innocent old lady to canny operator, depending on what suits her. With the exception of an ill-advised flashback episode that stops the season in its tracks for some unnecessary exposition, “Clipped” moves at a quick and breathless pace, channeling the feeling of a news story that spirals out of control.

“Clipped” is less confident when zooming out from the beat-by-beat madness to its big picture takeaways. Except for Sterling, every major character gets a confidant who acts as the angel on their shoulder: Justine (Harriet Sansom Harris), a woman who actually left her loathsome, rich husband and pushes Shelly to do the same; Deja (Yvonna Pearson), an ex-VJ who advises Stiviano on the fleeting nature of fame; incredibly, LeVar Burton as himself, a fellow Black celebrity who spends his steam room sessions with Rivers discussing the tightrope of staying palatable to a mass audience without betraying your roots. Valid as their points may be, all three act more as mouthpieces for a present-day point of view than people as plausibly flawed as their selected foils. 

Meanwhile, a closed-door debate among the Clippers over whether to take the court post-tape turns into a Socratic dialogue on athlete activism. (The scene culminates with Rivers rolling a clip of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists at the 1968 Olympics.) Stiviano remains an enigma, preserved in amber behind her iconic, face-obscuring visor and played by Coleman with childlike petulance. She comes across most vividly when “Clipped” presents her many contradictions without explaining them: a woman who denied her own Blackness while igniting a conflagration over anti-Black racism; a shameless lover of fleeting, material things who adopted two young boys in the middle of her 15 minutes. When she’s shown watching Kim Kardashian’s wedding like an instructional video, it’s too straightforward a take on an erratic woman unknown even to herself.

Like “Uncut Gems” before it, “Clipped” is that strangest of beasts: a period piece set in the relatively recent past. Interstitials render basic, block-text memes in Instagram’s decade-old interface; Rivers gets a private call from then-President Obama. This approach revives the kind of small details that get sanded down over time. Did you remember that both Rivers and NBA commissioner Adam Silver (Darin Cooper) were brand-new on the job, faced with an existential threat to their organizations before they’d even had a chance to establish their authority? Or that the tape leaked in the middle of a vanishingly rare playoff run for the Clippers, who were pitted against an ascendant, Steph Curry-led Golden State Warriors in the first round? Even before Welch and her writers had to craft a compelling narrative, history did it for them.

But “Clipped” also exists in the awkward middle ground between short- and long-term memory. Implicitly, the Sterling situation is presented as a precursor to the NBA’s 2020 walkouts that followed the murder of George Floyd and shooting of Jacob Blake. Arguments about the players’ actions and eventual impact are couched in far broader terms than the particular dilemma at hand. Should the Clippers have done more than a silent protest? Did exiling Sterling do anything to change the system that supported him for decades? “Clipped” can’t answer these questions; the NBA and its stakeholders still haven’t. It can only dedicate itself to the task of recreating an absurd, exasperating moment in time. In athletics as in art, tight focus yields dividends.

The first two episodes of “Clipped” are now streaming on Hulu, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Tuesdays.

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