clipped (season 1)

It wasn’t lost on people that the Lakers recently received a prestige HBO series in the form of Winning Time, whereas the Clippers - longtime second-class basketball citizens of Los Angeles - were fittingly reduced to streaming on Hulu. Clipped, created by Gina Welch, chronicles the downfall of the franchise’s notorious owner Donald Sterling, who spent decades as a swollen boil on the ass of the NBA before the league was finally able to lance him over racist recordings that surfaced on TMZ. It feels like a subject bursting with dramatic possibilities (concerning professional sports, race, wealth, cancel culture) - and it is - yet the series never seems quite sure how to make sense of it all… the narrative ingredients are simply jumbled in a pot and left to simmer at low boil - underseasoned and ultimately undercooked.

Some have pointed out that Mickey Rourke - his face ravaged by plastic surgery and scar tissue - bears more than a passing resemblance to Sterling these days… and he might have brought a tragic, Shakespearean grandeur to the role. Instead the show cast sitcom veteran Ed O’Neil (of Married… with Children and Modern Family fame) and, unsurprisingly, he’s terrific, though his portrayal never rises much beyond that of an oblivious cartoon - unable to grasp his perilous situation, let alone reckon with it. He certainly captures Sterling’s more grating qualities - that particularly noxious blend of extreme affluence and crass classlessness with more than a hint of sleaze (exemplified by his preseason “white party,” in which he parades his predominately Black players around in front of his wealthy white friends like something out of Get Out). Laurence Fishburne, as the team’s championship-winning coach Doc Rivers, is mostly reduced to two core modes - righteous indignation and extreme incredulity. He’s torn, fascinatingly, between the recognition that he should be taking a principled stand by boycotting and his competitive fervor… cognizant that this was the rare Clippers team (led by bona fide franchise stars Chris Paul and Blake Griffin - both oddly miscast) that could genuinely compete for a title (and cement his own status as a coaching legend in the process). Fishburne, much like Rivers himself, brings instant credibility to the table. But the show gropes its way through awkwardly self-conscious sequences, such as a flashback to Doc’s playing days, when he struggles with the Rodney King verdict from his position of privilege, or showing clips of Jesse Owens in Berlin to the team as evidence of athletic triumph carrying more social weight than any protest (when in doubt, simply have Rivers philosophize in the sauna with LeVar Burton - don’t ask).​

Where Clipped feels most at sea, however, is its attempts to get a handle on V. Stiviano (played by Cleopatra Coleman), Sterling’s half-Black/half-Mexican personal assistant and pseudo-mistress (she rubs his feet and coos affirmations in his ear while appearing courtside with him at games, but wasn’t sleeping with him - supposedly). It’s all too easy to depict V. as a wannabe fame-whore in the Kardashian mold - obsessing over social media (the show revels endlessly in shots of scrolling Instagram feeds), trying to leverage the scandal into some sort of “brand” (she proudly shows a box of “V. Stiviano” hats to an incredulous friend, unable to articulate what their actual appeal would be to the buying public), parading enigmatically in front of the media in facial visor and roller skates - but that portrayal is hard to reconcile with a woman who was also in the process of adopting two teenage boys. At times she appears pointedly ruthless in her pursuit of notoriety; at others, almost childlike in her naivety over the scandal’s fallout (she insists, in her Barbara Walters interview, that she and Sterling remain “best friends”). The biggest standout, not surprisingly, is the ever-dependable Jacki Weaver. As Sterling’s long-suffering wife Shelly, she’s positioned as a materteral presence, the candied antidote to her husband’s toxic bologna (she refers to everyone in the organization - from the staff to the players - as “sweetie” and “honey,” as if she were doting on her surrogate grandchildren). But the show, to its credit, isn’t content to direct its slings and arrows solely at Sterling. Shelly, for all her honeysuckle folksiness, serves as a reminder - in the show’s cutting denouement - that the 1% truly are collectively indivisible from their own self-centered orbit. In the end, the Sterlings lose their control of the Clippers (to the tune of two billion), V. fades back into obscurity, Doc and his players pass from the hands of one billionaire owner to another, and the NBA machine marches on, confident in its brief display of moral superiority. Maybe that’s why Clipped ultimately feels so frustrating. For all its soapy spectacle, it’s a series about a seismic event that somehow ended up changing virtually nothing.