Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Clipped’ On FX/Hulu, A Drama About The L.A. Clippers And The Woman Who Exposed Donald Sterling’s Racism

During the 40 years that the Clippers have called Los Angeles home, they’ve always been the city’s “other” professional basketball team. It’s pretty easy to understand when you share a city with the Lakers, who have been cranking out championships and employing Hall of Fame players and coaches pretty consistently during those four decades. But just as the Clips, a perennially losing and mismanaged franchise, started being consistent winners, their owner, Donald Sterling, was outed for racist statements that were recorded by his girlfriend, V. Stiviano. That story is documented in a new FX on Hulu scripted drama.

CLIPPED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A voice says, “Mr. Sterling always says, ‘Some teams sell success; the Clippers sell hope.’ What he means is that we usually lose. He says a lot of things he shouldn’t.”

The Gist: It’s 2013 and Doc Rivers (Laurence Fishburne) arrives in Los Angeles to take over the L.A. Clippers’ head coaching job. After a successful run in Boston, including the Celtics’ 2008 championship, people wonder why Rivers would take the job to coach the perpetually-terrible franchise, much less work for Donald Sterling (Ed O’Neill), the team’s notoriously cheap and mercurial owner. No one will ever confuse Sterling, a real estate magnate, for George Steinbrenner; unlike the Buss family, who own their more-dominant Staples Center co-tenants, the Lakers, Sterling isn’t overly interested in spending to put together a winning team.

As soon as he walks into the team’s offices, he tells Sterling and team president Andy Roeser (Kelly AuCoin) that he wants to go after free agent shooting guard JJ Redick (Charlie McElveen). With star power forward Blake Griffin (Austin Scott) and point guard Chris Paul (J. Alphonse Nicholson) already in place, Rivers thinks the team, which won a lot of games the previous season but was bounced in the first round of the playoffs, can go all the way with Redick in the fold. Sterling is reluctant to spend the money, then later balks when he learns that Redick is white, finally giving the OK after a contentious phone call with Sterling and Roeser.

But Sterling has other things on his plate, namely his “assistant” V. Stiviano (Cleopatra Coleman), the latest woman whom Sterling has lavished gifts and attention on, much to the irritation of his wife Shelly (Jacki Weaver). The Sterlings have been married for decades, and Shelly has done as much as Donald has to build the Sterling corporation into what it is.

Stiviano wants more from her relationship with Sterling, and protects her interests by recording all of their interactions, claiming it’s for her boss/boyfriend’s protection. But she also knows that Sterling is a pretty blatant racist, and keeps that in her back pocket.

At the yearly “white party” that the Sterlings throw, Donald Sterling takes Griffin, his favorite player, by the hand and introduces him to friends and high-rolling season-ticket holders, while Rivers finds out that Griffin and Paul basically hate each other. Stiviano shows up in a brand-new Ferrari, courtesy of Donald, and Shelly wishes that her husbands latest squeeze wouldn’t make her “kept woman” status so obvious.

As the season starts, the Clips play well, despite distractions like Sterling bringing Stiviano and season-ticket holders into the locker room after a game. Sterling screams at Stiviano for posing with Magic Johnson at a Dodgers game. “Why are you taking pictures with minorities? Why?” he asks.

Shelly gets tired of Stiviano constantly demanding more from Donald, especially after she hears he’s buying her a $1.8 million duplex for her and her foster children. So she “takes care” of it by suing her for theft of their community property.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Of course, the obvious comparison to Clipped is Winning Time, the scripted series about the 1980s Lakers.

Our Take: Sometimes there’s more drama in losing than there is in winning. And while the Clippers were actually a pretty good team during the time period depicted in Clipped, created by Gina Welch (Castle Rock) and based on the podcast The Sterling Affairs, the team’s ignominious history and the scandal that resulted in the NBA forcing Sterling to sell the team has more than enough intrigue for a scripted drama. What we’re not quite sure of is whether Welch and her writers really put enough of a focus on where the actual drama is.

It’s pretty obvious that the story should center around Stiviano leaking to TMZ the recordings she made of Sterling, showing the public exactly how big of a racist he was. In Coleman’s performance, we see that Stiviano wasn’t just your standard-grade gold digger; she wanted to be in a position of security, because she was raising a family and wanted to make sure her foster children were taken care of. And she also knew that, as much as she may want Sterling to dump Shelly and marry her, that wasn’t going to happen. It was very clever of Stiviano to convince Sterling that their conversations should be recorded for his protection, but all along she was doing it for her own purposes, in case the gravy train stopped running. Coleman communicates all that, and she’s the most compelling member of a great cast.

O’Neill does a good job as the always-striving Sterling, who was vain and afraid of looking like the near-octogenarian he was. Sterling’s brand of racism was only overt in private, as he lavished praise on his Black players and Rivers in public. But even then, O’Neill shows that the praise was filled with microaggressions, such as the mistrust that Redick could be a good player because he’s white, or the attention he paid to the mixed-race Griffin compared to his Black players. Weaver is equally game as Shelly, a person who knows the ground rules of being married to Donald Sterling, but will fiercely protect what’s hers from interlopers like Stiviano who demand too much.

It’s the basketball part of the series that we’re wondering about. Everyone does a good job in their roles, and Fishburne plays Rivers with a fierceness that shows why the publicly genial Rivers has been in such demand as a coach over the past two decades (and why he was such a good leader in his playing days). But the drama of the season being depicted, 2013-14, seems like pretty standard team drama, where not everyone gets along but pulls together when the team plays well. Where the team dynamic will really come into play is how Rivers and the team handle the Stiviano leak. If you remember how that went down, Rivers and the players, none of whom were ever fans of Sterling to begin with, turned their backs on the owner after Stiviano’s recordings came out. The sooner we get to that part, the better this aspect of the show will be.

Stylistically, Clipped plays out in a much more straightforward manner than Winning Time did, and that should be a relief to viewers who were annoyed by the many style flourishes of the Adam McKay-produced series. But it’s also a story that needs to be more focused than it is, because in this case, the players and coach are not the drivers of the show’s drama.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Stiviano looks at the lawsuit papers and mutters “Oh my god, Oh my god, Ohmy god.”

Sleeper Star: There’s a funny scene where LeVar Burton plays himself as he gives Rivers advice inside a sauna. We’re always happy to see LeVar Burton show up on a show, even if it’s briefly.

Most Pilot-y Line: The driver picking up Rivers from the airport says, “Clippers offices? Are you sure you don’t want to circle back to Departures, [and] fuck off back to Boston?” The guy’s a Lakers fan, you see.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While Clipped lacks focus at times, the story of V. Stiviano outing Donald Sterling as a virulent racist is too well-done to not recommend the show.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.