‘Clipped’ Review: A Performance-Driven Portrayal of a Tawdry Scandal

In FX’s Clipped, we first meet Doc Rivers (Laurence Fishburne), the real-life basketball coach of the L.A. Clippers, in 2013 just as he’s taking over the so-called “worst franchise in NBA history.” He has his doubts about the team, especially the presence of their volatile, self-important owner, Donald Sterling (Ed O’Neill), but he knows that his legacy will be sealed forever if he can put a ring on the finger of L.A. basketball’s ugly sister.

The scenes of Rivers whipping these perennial losers into shape are pure shots of sports-drama pathos. After a bracing defeat to a hardier team, the players begin the next training session with Rivers viciously trash-talking each of them. He goes after their personal lives and their partners, hitting them all in their most vulnerable spots. They start barking insults back at him, and then at each other, and he smiles. From that point on, they don’t get bullied by anyone.

No matter how much progress they make on the court, though, Sterling is always looming on the sidelines. The players hate the way that he walks them around by the hand, the way that he talks to them, the way that he dresses them down from the comfort of courtside. That Sterling is a racist is understood by everyone, made clear through everything he does, even if he never quite voices those feelings out loud. Until one night he does. During an argument with his mistress, V (a mesmerizingly weird Cleopatra Coleman), Sterling berates her for “bringing Black people” to his games. She records the conversation, and it soon leaks to the press.

So insulated from life’s consequences by wealth and power, Sterling can’t imagine that the revelation will hurt him. He’s both deeply complex and childishly simple, and O’Neill does a tremendous job of making him as odious as you would expect (the scenes of him sweet-talking V are truly gag-worthy) while also managing to make him funny, charming, and even, in a very oily way, sweet. In O’Neill’s hands, Sterling isn’t a cartoon villain, but a very human one.

While Sterling butts heads with Doc and V on various occasions, it’s his wife, Shelly (Jacki Weaver), who we see him going one-on-one with most often. Meeting each new crisis with the wide eyes and high-pitched voice of a scandalized housewife, Weaver skillfully portrays Shelly as a figure who’s simultaneously sympathetic, complicit, and absurd—a woman who knows how awful her husband is but who has too much invested in their life together to ever admit it, even to herself. There’s something morbidly delightful about watching Shelly conjure ever more delusional explanations for her husband’s behavior so that she can remain in denial.

The crackling interplay between these key players provides Clipped with its foundation, and it always knows just who to call off the bench when the energy threatens to dip or the tempo needs to change. Sometimes that’s LeVar Burton, playing himself, Rivers’s constant confidant during his time in L.A. Other times it’s Harriet Sansom Harris, returning to the sharp-tongued stylings of her Bebe Glazer days as Shelly’s indominable best friend, Justine.

Clipped revels in the tawdry tone in which this modern-day media scandal was portrayed across magazine covers and social media. In between scenes, it often throws up images of the tweets and memes that each new development in the story has sparked, flicking through them with the rapacious speed of a gossip-hungry doom scroller.

But as much fun as it has with the frivolous nature of fame, celebrity, and social media, Clipped doesn’t merely pay lip service to the more serious side of the scandal. The scene in which the Clippers meet to discuss their next move following the revelation of Sterling’s comments is the show’s most powerful bit of drama. As they assemble in a quiet, dimly lit room, the music falls away, along with the noise and motion that buzzes through most of the series. It’s just a bunch of guys, facing each other, trying to figure how to find justice in a broken system.