'Clipped' Is an Absolutely Miserable Watch
Yes, there's some fun to be had with the portrayals of 2014 Doc and JJ. It's not nearly enough for AU to make the show watchable.
It's hard to find joy as a Sixers fan this month. The draft and free agency are still weeks away, and the longer we have to wait for them the easier it is to get in our heads about how both are gonna end up disappointing for us, if not downright disastrous. The Celtics are one win away from Al Horford doing his signature shimmy with the Larry O'Brien trophy while Matt Damon yells "How do ya like them apples?" at us. Even the Phillies, a salve on so many of our deepest wounds this summer, have been alternating travel days with excruciating losses for much of the past week. There's just not a lot of comfort for us to be had right now, not a lot to pass the days until we can start taking steps to put this most recent season's disappointment behind us.
I decided to check out Clipped. To be honest I'd been kinda excited at the prospect of an FX series about the 2014 Donald Sterling saga anyway: It looked like good, trashy fun, like an American Crime Story edition where Blake Griffin's Kia commercials could conceivably be a plot point. And yes, I was confident we'd get some good JJ Redick and Doc Rivers content, particularly with the latter being played by the legendary Laurence Fishburne -- which now probably ranks third, behind only the Celtics title and making it to the 15 Best Coaches list for NBA 75, among accomplishments on Doc's career resumé. At the very least, I was confident it would help make the weeks of waiting for Daryl Morey to stop fiddling with ChatGPT and playing the Chappell Roan album on repeat and get to work go by a little quicker.
It didn't. It won't. It stinks. Please don't watch it.
I mean, it's not terrible, I guess. It's got that reliable FX sheen and schlockiness, a pretty good cast of mostly recognizable names -- as well as quality That Guys like Harry from Mad Men and Dollar Bill from Billions, both playing Clippers execs -- and a decent number of moments an episode that tickle the back of your brain and make you go, "Oh yeah, I vaguely remember that happening, wild." But at a certain point during episode three -- which I must've fallen asleep during three nights in a row before actually getting through it -- I noticed myself rolling my eyes and checking how long was left in the episode frequently enough that I had to take a moment and realize, "Huh, I am not actually enjoying any part of this at all." It's not a good show. Not even the Doc parts.
The biggest problem with it on a fundamental level is that it's a show based around figures who we have witnessed just do too much batshit crazy stuff in real life to ever buy as coherent television characters. Ed O'Neill's Donald Sterling is a little off-kilter and high-strung and unsettling in his dealings with his wife and with his team, but he's at least speaking coherent English and saying things with comprehensible, if deeply messed-up reasoning behind them. Then you get to the scenes where he recreates the what the fuck Sterling we actually heard on those tapes -- the Donald Sterling who sounded like he was doing Master Shake karaoke -- and it's like his character was briefly replaced by a doppelgänger beamed in from Twin Peaks: The Return. You can't make a compelling dramatic TV character out of that guy, even as a supervillain. He's just too surreal, too unrecognizable as human. After getting a glimpse of that Sterling, Ed O'Neill may as well be doing a Sean Connery impression the rest of the time.
Same with V Stiviano, Sterling's half-assistant, half-mistress who briefly became famous -- although apparently not famous enough to get her own Wikipedia entry, tough break there V -- for leaking tapes of his racist ramblings. Played by Cleopatra Coleman, she's probably the closest thing to a protagonist in the show's first two episodes, and she's portrayed mostly as a hard-luck working girl trying to make it in a rich white man's Hollywood, ambitious and decently smart and at least somewhat well-meaning. You sorta feel for her, even through her more obvious machinations and delusions of grandeur. Then she straps on the visor and rollerblades and you're left going "wait I thought this was an actual person?" The show tries to lend purpose to V's actions, but said actions are simply too alien for any reasonable motivations -- at one point her new PR director tells her she should take advantage of the fact that she's "trending," and in the next scene she takes her pet turtle out for a walk or something, as if that was a reasonable journey from Point A to Point B. The fact that these things actually happened in real life in theory should make the show more intriguing, but actually make the show seem totally pointless: When truth is that much stranger than fiction, why bother with the fiction part of it at all?
The basketball parts of the show also struggle with reality, though for largely opposite reasons: Whereas the reality of the Sterling situation was too fantastical for drama, the Clippers' inner workings were too mundane. So the show has to make a very big deal out of the drama between Chris Paul and Blake Griffin, out of DeAndre Jordan's lackluster free throw shooting, and particularly out of the Clippers Curse, which a random kid rattles off evidence of in one particularly absurd scene as if he was auditioning for the Farrelly Brothers' sequel to Fever Pitch. Meanwhile, the casting is haphazard enough that it can be tough to even remember which actor is supposed to be which Clipper. Nothing makes you appreciate how much care HBO's Winning Time put into building a team of Lakers actors with plausible physical resemblances to their roles than seeing Clipped's DeAndre Jordan and Jamal Crawford walking next to each other with barely an inch or two's difference between them. (Matt Barnes, portrayed by Insecure's towering Sarunas J. Jackson, apparently should've been playing center the entire time.)
And yeah, Doc. Laurence Fishburne tries (and to his credit, occasionally succeeds) at portraying Doc as both the show's emotional center and its voice of reason, and unlike his player-actors, he's a decent physical match for Rivers' post-middle-aged lumberiness. But he's much better at capturing Doc's symbolic voice than he is his literal one: There's something sonically singular about a coach whose throat has hoarsened over decades of hollering at refs and teammates that no dialect coach could ever hope to help an actor recreate -- it's like trying to age a fine Bordeaux by just leaving it out in the sun for a couple months. Most of the time, Fishburne sounds like he's going for some combination of Cedric the Entertainer and Christian Bale's Batman, and it is.... distracting. And of course, Doc's own well-established slitheriness is completely glossed over here: When asked why he left Boston for the Clippers, he replies, "I like a challenge," as if he didn't have one foot out the door the second it was clear the C's would be moving on from the Big Three era and completely rebuilding.
There's a little more fun to be had with the show's version of JJ Redick. The actor who plays him, Charlie McElveen, does a good enough job of approximating JJ's kind of blandly handsome douchiness, though he's a little too chill for how stiff JJ always came off -- it's impossible, for instance, to picture McElveen's Redick lecturing Fishburne's Rivers on First Take a decade later. But Sixers fans might get a kick out of the recurring plot point of JJ's Clippers teammates trying to goad him into saying the N-word, and particularly out of the part where JJ gets self-righteous at the team's post-Sterling-on-TMZ meeting about not "playing for that racist troglodyte," and is promptly mocked by Matt Barnes and essentially told to shut the fuck up. It's something.
It's not enough, though. None of the basketball scenes in Clipped are fully satisfying, either on or off the court, and most of them feel like they're not happening in the same universe as the Sterling/Stiviano absurdity, let alone the same city. There's bigger and certainly still-resonant themes of race, class and gender to be delved into here -- ones the original, O.J.-focused American Crime Story actually kinda nailed -- but this fictionalized retelling of a story about some of the weirdest, most Hollywood-brained people on the planet is nowhere to explore them. We're only three episodes in, and I'm basically pot-committed for the final three, but if you haven't started yet I'd find some other way to try to occupy yourself through these next couple weeks. Aren't we getting yet another Iverson doc sometime? Is that one on streaming yet?
Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.
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Hard to watch a sports series where you’ve been following the real life characters for years and were witnessed those events when they happened. That’s why documentaries are far superior to these types of productions.