The Pitch: In the spring of 2014, the Los Angeles Clippers (known to most Angelenos as “oh right, there are two NBA teams in L.A.”) were on a bit of an upswing, thanks to new coach Doc Rivers (Laurence Fishburne) and star players like Blake Griffin (Austin Scott) and Chris Paul (J. Alphonse Nicholson). In fact, for the first time in the franchise’s history they stood a real chance of winning the championship.
Until, that is, the leaking of an audio recording, in which Clippers owner Donald Sterling (Ed O’Neill) said some not-great things about Black people to his assistant/mistress V. Stiviano (Cleopatra Coleman). As the world reacts to Sterling’s comments, the team tries to figure out how to move forward — or if it should even keep playing at all. Meanwhile, the question emerges: Will a rich white man, in 21st-century America, actually experience consequences for his actions?
Full Court Press: There’s some real ugliness at the core of FX’s Clipped, executive produced by Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson, who also EPed similar based-on-true-events limited series like the American Crime Story franchise. That ugliness is not a criticism, but rather praise, as the limited series doesn’t flinch in exploring the toxicity that contributed to the events chronicled.
Clipped is almost as detail-obsessed as HBO’s late lamented Winning Time, when it comes to chronicling the inner workings of a professional basketball team. However, Clipped has at least two advantages over the recently canceled Lakers drama: A much narrower focus, and much less interest in mythologizing the participants in this story. Also, because the infamous recording gets leaked relatively early in the series, creator Gina Welch and lead director Kevin Bray are able to delve into the full ramifications of its impact, on a cultural and legal level.
More Relatable Than You’d Think: There are two major threads running through Clipped that have much more universal appeal than you’d anticipate from a limited series about a professional basketball scandal. The first is about what it’s like to have a bad boss. Not a demanding boss or an absent boss, but a bad boss. The kind of boss who doesn’t know how to listen to his employees. Who actively ignores them, especially when they beg him to not do something that might hurt the company. The kind of boss that employees learn to work around, crossing their fingers that said boss won’t still find a way to keep them from getting their jobs done.
In Clipped, Ed O’Neill’s Donald Sterling is one of those bosses, in scenes that will prove triggering if you’ve ever had someone similar signing your paychecks. There’s a scene in which Doc Rivers, while meeting with some other colleagues, literally has Sterling on muted speakerphone rambling in the background, only occasionally unmuting the call to give the owner the impression that anyone’s listening to his bigoted tirade. From the verbal abuse and racism to Sterling’s awe-inspiring entitlement (including eating the food off other people’s plates without their permission), it’s a portrait of a human nightmare, one who believes he truly owns the people who work for him. It’s a meaty role for O’Neill, though at times it’s almost hard to watch him in action.
Clipped (FX)