SPOILER ALERT: This article contains details about the series finale of “Clipped,” now available on Hulu.
The emperor without his clothes is still the emperor. That’s the ugly fact that FX’s “Clipped” arrives at in its sequence finale.
After Donald Sterling (Ed O’Neill) fails to stop his wife Shelly (Jacki Weaver) from claiming that her husband is mentally incapacitated and taking over the family trust, Donald relents by selling the Los Angeles Clippers to the turbulent former Microsoft executive Steve Ballmer. In doing so, Donald also stops fighting his lifetime ban from the NBA, imposed on him after TMZ publishes an audio recording of Sterling delivering a racist tirade to his assistant-lover V. Stiviano (Cleopatra Coleman) berating her for publicly associating with black people.
For waving the white flag, the Sterlings are rewarded with $2 billion in the sale of the Clippers: an exponential return on the $12 million Donald spent to buy the team in the 1980s. And after becoming much, much richer for the simple act of walking away, Donald is seen kicking back naked in his Malibu mansion, a duplicate of the Los Angeles Times spread across his pale crotch. Back at a serviceable wedding, Shelly reminds him of their dinner plans before picking up the paper, shaking her head with a “so sad” and dropping it back onto the octogenarian’s genitals to reveal a headline truly from the summer of 2014: “Ferguson Proves Transformative.”
“It felt vital to point out that, within the Sterlings’ world, this tectonic experience that was happening across the country was just a copy of L.A. Times,” says Gina Welch, showrunner, executive producer and writer of “Clipped.” “This series follows a racial reckoning that had a string tied to it in the media narrative. But how could you then begin to understand what happened that summer?”
Jacki Weaver as Shelley Sterling and Ed O’Neill as Donald Sterling in ‘Clipped’
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It’s a very unpleasant warning that sums up a retrospective omniscience at the heart of “Clipped.” The series often defied the uncanny valley: an undertaking that comes with the territory of casting actors to play figures like Chris Paul and Steph Curry, with whom the general public has had a relationship for years. (The final episode’s superlative occasion of this — an actor playing Anderson Cooper — acted as an admission by the show that it had fully dived through some bizarre looking glass.)
“There’s a risk — when you write a half-hour present that’s set 10 years ago — of trying to tell the viewer all the pieces that are going to happen later,” Welch says. But “Clipped” possessed that awareness to distinctly anachronistic ends, notably in its recreations of decade-old meme codes that seem rather quaint and rudimentary compared with today’s online content. And with the present’s remaining gesture toward the Black Lives Matter movement in the making, the producers want to place the spectacle of Donald Sterling’s cancellation (a term that hadn’t entered the general public lexicon at the time) in context as the beginning of an American decade shaped by political fragmentation.
“The current information is that the former president and current candidate is saying he’s going to work on ‘anti-white sentiment,’” says government director and producer Kevin Bray. “(The events of this show) seem almost childish compared to having a former president say something so idiotic. That’s part of the explanation for why this image of Ferguson exists in the present. Who could have imagined what this could become?”
“This is in the early stages of contemporary athletes starting to speak out,” says producer and co-writer Rembert Browne, citing when the Miami Heat posed in hoodies to draw attention to the killing of Trayvon Martin, who was killed by a police officer in 2012. “And we’re starting to head directly into a Trump that we don’t know is coming. Showing some individuals, like the Sterlings, feeling like, ‘Oh, Ferguson is a factor that’s happening there. It doesn’t affect us,’ felt real.”
By the beginning of the finale, Stiviano finds herself left in the lurch by the media circus she has stirred up. After a disastrous interview with Barbara Walters, she is sued by the Sterlings, who seize most of her property, along with the duplex given to her by Donald. The sequel leaves her with a complicated coda: we find her sitting again on the steps of the Sterling estate, reminiscing about the proximity to the energy she loved before he bought and sold her for his five minutes of fame. It’s one of several artistic liberties the show has taken with Stiviano, whose publicity during the scandal has largely been confined to a handful of interviews and some paparazzi footage.
Cleopatra Coleman as V. Stiviano in ‘Clipped’
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“She was kind of a heavyweight on IG. I had to expose everyone to the Wayback Machine,” Browne says, explaining how he and the other writers scoured the Web Archive to develop the feature. “She left breadcrumbs, but a lot of those breadcrumbs got deleted over time.”
“We defend the viewpoints. There are differing opinions on whether or not Donald and V. had a sexual relationship, or who sent the tape to TMZ. I feel like the viewer can have completely different experiences of that issue,” Welch says. “Individuals can disagree moderately on what actually occurred. And Cleo was so dedicated and such an incredible advocate for her character that it became a dialogue between us whether or not V. would say a certain thing. She really helped shape that from there.”
Finding closure for Doc Rivers (Laurence Fishburne) posed a different problem altogether. Unlike Stiviano and the Sterlings, Rivers has remained a fixture in the media and the NBA since the Clippers scandal. He coached in L.A. for six more years before stepping down in 2020 after the team was eliminated in the convention semifinals, blowing a 3-1 lead against the Denver Nuggets. He then moved on to the Philadelphia 76ers, who have never made it past the semifinals in his three-year tenure. Now, Rivers is the coach of the Milwaukee Bucks — another group currently shaped by star players and championship hopes.
“He has these very clear desires for greatness,” Browne says of Rivers. “Some of it was thrown into him after he became a championship coach with the Celtics. A lot of it has probably been in his system for the last 50 years.”
“Doc ended up leaving the Clippers. You want to try to capture some of those questions that the viewer knows are going to happen,” Welch says. “That was part of our concept in making this story about Doc contemplating what’s enough for him. He has a championship with the Celtics. He’s had this great career as an NBA player. But there’s still something missing.”
The end of “Clipped” finds Rivers getting some satisfaction after the scandal, admonishing Shelly at a restaurant for her shrewd sale of the team — a blatant act of financial cover-up that also included some surprising stipulations, such as guaranteed parking spots and VIP passes, the unusual official title of “Number One Fan” for Shelly, and the promise of three championship rings if the Clippers make it to the top.
However, the final scene of the series shows Rivers reuniting with Elgin Baylor (Clifton Davis) — one of the great NBA players of his era and the Clippers’ longtime general manager. A flashback in Episode 4 illuminated Baylor’s acrimonious departure from the team. After years of trying to make ends meet under Sterling’s relentless pettiness, Baylor is up for a demotion in the front office. He threatens to sue the team for wrongful termination and discrimination. (His lawyers dropped the racism claim before trial; the jury later ruled against Baylor’s age discrimination claims and declined to award damages in 2011.)
Everyone eventually ends up having to fight for their dignity within Sterling’s Clippers. However, the producers wanted to deliver the final line to Baylor — one of Sterling’s oldest and most abjectly treated victims (out of who-knows-how-many who suffered under his discriminatory practices as an ownership overseer) and one of the few who publicly stood up to the billionaire, even as the NBA closed ranks to protect the team owner.
Clifton Davis as Elgin Baylor in ‘Clipped’
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“I’ve never approached this story from a place of heroism. But to the extent that there is a hero, I really do think that the prerogative of the present is that it’s Elgin Baylor, and that’s why we end with him,” Welch says. “It’s that moment where we give the world back the legend, despite everything that happened to him under Sterling.”
“The people in the present have lived 10 years since then, and I feel like a lot of them are better for it,” Browne provides. “You learn from both mistakes or missed opportunities. The life that came after that is where the catharsis comes in.”
Again to Welch. “It’s accessible after the cameras are gone.”
All six episodes of “Clipped” are available on Hulu.
Opposite What happened to V. Stiviano, Elgin Baylor? first appeared on All celebrities.