Clipped Series-Premiere Recap: The Next Mrs. Sterling

The “Clippers Curse” is a term used to describe the historic futility of the NBA’s most feeble franchise, The Los Angeles Clippers, which Doc Rivers (Laurence Fishburne), the newly appointed head coach of the 2013-2014 team, describes in Clipped as having gone 43 years without a championship and only advanced to the second round twice. The Clips have since done better, including its first Western Conference finals appearance in 2020-2021, but until they reach the mountaintop, they will be treated like the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs were during their championship droughts. (86 and 71 years, respectively.) The vanishingly small percentage of Los Angeles sports fans who are into the Clippers instead of the storied Lakers — the ones who have to tolerate getting outnumbered during home games in its shared arena — tend to have either great coping skills or sadomasochistic tendencies. Even wins are tough.

A phrase like “Clippers Curse” makes it sound like some cosmic, unknowable force is responsible for the team’s continued struggles. In reality, the curse can be pinned on one man, Donald T. Sterling, who bought the team for a mere $12.5 million when it was still in San Diego (L.A. isn’t known for its great sailing ships) in 1981 and held onto it until 2014, when the new NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, banned him from the league in the wake of a racist audio recording. From the beginning, Sterling showed no interest in investing in a winning franchise despite a net worth far greater than Lakers owner (and fellow real-estate mogul) Jerry Buss, and his front office was plagued by dysfunction and incompetence. There was always the sense that Sterling held the Clippers as a vanity project, and the notion of “ownership” to his Black players had an unmistakable plantation mentality to it. The franchise had deeper problems than blowing a No. 1 pick on Michael Olowokandi.

Based on Ramona Shelburne’s six-episode “30 for 30” podcast The Sterling Affairs, Clipped opens with a telling bit of narration from V. Stiviano (Cleopatra Coleman), the young personal assistant/sidepiece whose recording would eventually bring Sterling (Ed O’Neill) down: “Mr. Sterling always says some teams sell success. The Clippers sell hope.” In other words, winning was not a priority so much as keeping suckers on the line. Though the series flashes briefly to the bombshell to come, creator Gina Welch, who wrote the episode, works hard to set up the Clippers’ losing culture by starting with the man determined to change it. When Doc arrives at LAX for his first meeting with the team — this after leaving the Boston Celtics, the pristine franchise where he won his first and only title as coach — he gets escorted by a Lakers fan in a Prius because the Clips forgot to send a driver. When he turns up hungry for lunch, he asks for a bento box but has to accept the sad deli platter the boss ordered.

For Doc, this is all standard stuff. He played under Sterling as a guard in the 1991-92 season and detested the man like everyone else, but the league had changed, and his stature had changed, too. Plus, as he tells the driver, “I like a challenge.” His strategy throughout the events of this first episode is to tolerate Sterling’s behavior and do everything possible to protect his players, who were arguably the most talented core in Clippers history. If they could all succeed in putting blinders on and focusing on basketball, then they could win a title despite Sterling’s best efforts to sabotage it. Doc is coming in with far more leverage than he had as a player, and the “Lob City” trio — future Hall-of-Famer Chris Paul (J. Alphonse Nicholson) at point guard, high-flying power forward Blake Griffin (Austin Scott), and hyper-athletic rim protector DeAndre Jordan (Sheldon Bailey) — would be one of the most formidable cores in the league.

From a team standpoint, the problems are immediate. Doc walks in the door with a plan to sign sharpshooter J.J. Redick (Charlie McElveen) to a reasonable contract, which is no small matter for a team that has trouble signing free agents. He wins the argument after much cajoling with the owner and with a skeptical Redick but nearly has the deal scotched when Sterling gets cold feet, expressing his surprise, among other things, to learn that Redick is white. (Sterling’s habit of soliciting options on players from random people in his orbit was notorious.) With that obstacle clear, others follow, like Sterling leading around his “fabulous” players like prize show ponies at his notorious annual “White Party” or barging into the locker room with his entourage, where he asks Jordan about his measurements. It’s obvious to the players, the Black ones especially, that Sterling saw them not as humans but as chattel.

But at least those problems are Doc’s to manage. Out of the clubhouse, a much bigger storm is brewing around V., who may be only the latest in a succession of young women to serve as Sterling’s “assistant”/driver/arm-candy/lover but proves to be the most dangerous. Sterling’s wife, Shelly (Jacki Weaver), has learned to tolerate her husband’s grotesque womanizing over the years in exchange for the lucrative business and lavish lifestyle they’ve built for themselves, but V. crosses the line. Between the money V. gets for “gifts” like a red Ferrari convertible and her conspicuous “hoochie” presence at the White Party, the arena, and on social media, the public humiliation for Shelly has become an acute source of misery. Something must be done about V. and the tension between the three is what starts the brush fire that consumes the whole organization.

Among this first episode’s strengths is the conception of Shelly, who’s ostensibly the victim in this scenario but is not seen as remotely innocent herself. She and Donald are partners, after all, and though the episode doesn’t get into the appalling instances of housing discrimination that should have led to Sterling’s ejection from the league much earlier, her retrograde attitudes are liberally sprinkled throughout the hour. Among friends at the party, she decries Obamacare as evidence of “the rise of the takers,” suggesting the laziness of the younger generation, and then heads to the kitchen to micromanage an employee for putting too much broccoli on the vegetable platter. Being a billionaire, as the culture teaches us repeatedly, is about losing a certain amount of self-awareness, in addition to any sense of how ordinary people live or the respect they should receive. That problem is not limited to Donald Sterling.

As for V., she’s not exactly an avatar of racial justice but a clout-seeking opportunist looking to get whatever she can out of her repulsive sugar daddy. Enjoying the perks of being close to a team owner threatens to make her mostly a rental, vulnerable to getting deposited at any time without much to show for her time with Sterling. To that end, she has succeeded in getting the car and she is trying to go further by cajoling Sterling to buy a $1.8 million duplex for her, her sister, and two foster children. That purchase, combined with her audacious statement to Shelly that she will be “the next Mrs. Sterling,” makes her a significant enough threat in Shelly’s eyes to do something that the Sterlings are notoriously eager to do — take the matter to court. Except here, V. has a powerful card to play.

Olowokandies

• Funny sidebar about V.’s odd skepticism about DeAndre Jordan. First, she impertinently asks Doc about whether he intends to trade Jordan. Later, she talks about his reputation as a possible “draft bust” entering the league. Both earn harsh reprimands. (And both are incorrect. Jordan is still getting minutes in the league in 2024.)

• The “Mr. Sterling” thing is real, so Doc’s refusal to call him that (“I’ll call him Mr. Sterling when he calls me Mr. Rivers”) is an early show of power.

• Redick talking to Doc about rumors over Sterling being so cheap that he once griped about having to buy socks for his players? That happened.

• Fascinating subplot about the tension between Chris Paul and Blake Griffin over leadership of the team. Not everyone appreciates Paul’s aggressive, relentless perfectionism, and it’s no small triumph for Doc to get the two men to ease off on each other. Still, Paul gets in a nice dig at the White Party, when Sterling is showing Griffin off: “You don’t get led by the hand unless you want to get led by the hand.”

• Keep an eye on Harriet Sansom Harris, cast here as one of Shelly’s friends. Harris has a long list of great credits in film and theatre, but she has most recently distinguished herself as a scene-stealer in two straight Paul Thomas Anderson films — once as a fussy client in Phantom Thread, again as a Hollywood agent in Licorice Pizza.

“Check out this dude’s eyes. That’s the wisdom of the Jurassic right there.” “Fuck a gecko. Chinese water dragon is the bonsai tree of the reptile world.” DeAndre Jordan, lizard appreciator.