Clipped Review: Hulu’s Tawdry Tale of Basketball Scandal Shoots and Misses
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Of L.A.’s two NBA teams, the Clippers have always been like the neglected little brother next to the more glamorous and celebrated Lakers. So it’s fitting, then, that FX’s new Clippers chronicle Clipped — premiering Tuesday, June 4 exclusively on Hulu; I’ve seen all six episodes — pales in comparison to HBO’s superior Lakers saga Winning Time. A gaudy and campy basketball docudrama sung in the key of Ryan Murphy (though Murphy isn’t involved in this production), Clipped bites off far more than it can chew. It’s part underdog sports drama, part overheated soap opera and part overly broad cultural satire… none of which are entirely successful.
Laurence Fishburne stars as Doc Rivers — though he makes no attempt to replicate Rivers’ signature raspy voice — who takes over as the team’s head coach in 2013 and wants to bring the franchise its first NBA championship. But he soon learns the Clippers are a second-rate franchise for a reason, with stale deli platters for lunch and penny-pinching roster moves. Team owner Donald Sterling (played by Ed O’Neill) is a lumbering sleazebag, and his “personal assistant” V. Stiviano (The Last Man on Earth’s Cleopatra Coleman) elbows her way into team meetings to offer advice when she’s not scrolling through Instagram.
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Sterling and V.’s relationship isn’t explicitly sexual — the most we see her do is rub his feet — but it’s grotesque nonetheless, with her slathering hair dye onto his receding hairline while wearing a lacy bodysuit. Sterling’s wife Shelly (Jacki Weaver) resents V.’s presence in her life, and when she files a lawsuit against her, the gloves come off. V. has been secretly recording her conversations with Donald, and when his highly unflattering quotes (“Why are you taking pictures with minorities?”) get leaked to the media, it explodes into a national scandal that shakes the team and the NBA itself.
There’s nothing subtle about any of this: Every bit of subtext from showrunner Gina Welch (FEUD: Bette and Joan) is highlighted and underlined to make sure we get the message, with a janky, made-for-TV movie sheen to all of it. (In one scene, V. arrives accompanied by a musical sting like she’s the Wicked Witch of the West.) Clipped takes faint swipes at racial injustice and cultural misogyny, but it’s a far, far cry from the nuance we got from The People vs. O.J. Simpson. The Sterlings’ curdled marriage is portrayed in an uncomfortable string of melodramatic screaming matches between O’Neill and Weaver, and the series never decides if it wants to play its story for laughs or for dramatic effect — so it ends up not doing either very well.
The basketball scenes are the weakest link here: A lot of clunky explanation is needed to get non-basketball fans up to speed, and fans will be distracted because the actors don’t look much like the players — with the notable exception of Insecure’s Sarunas J. Jackson, who’s a dead ringer for Matt Barnes. There’s a pivotal scene where the Clippers players debate not playing in a big playoff game to protest Sterling’s racist remarks… but it falls flat because we don’t know who half these people speaking in the scene are. Clipped never manages to find a narrative rhythm: The fourth episode is entirely wasted on unnecessary flashbacks in an effort to give us backstory that ultimately doesn’t illuminate much.
O’Neill’s Sterling is a boorish buffoon from a less civilized era — a bit like Al Bundy if he won the lottery, actually — but the actor is almost too likable to play a certified turd like Sterling. Coleman has her moments as V., though, with a glazed smile that pops up whenever camera bulbs start flashing. The baby-voiced V. views the Kardashians as role models, and she clearly enjoys all the attention she’s getting, even amid a scandal. Clipped might’ve worked better if it had approached the story just from her perspective; a late gut-punch V. suffers is the closest this show gets to emotional heft. But as is, it’s too muddled and too messy to offer any real insight on a sordid chapter in basketball history.
THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Clipped gets down in the gutter to chronicle the Donald Sterling scandal, but its campy style and muddled tone make it a misfire.
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