Basketball is a beautiful, fast-paced game, but maybe it moves too quickly to effectively capture up close. That would help to explain why so many notable movies and shows about the sport focus on backstage wheelings and dealings, the big business of ball-playing on display in movies as varied as He Got Game, High Flying Bird, Blue Chips, Hustle, and Air. These types of stories exist about football or baseball, too, but they’re balanced out by countless narratives that depend on substantial gameplay (and gameplay-adjacent stuff, like inspirational locker-room speeches). Basketball, on the other hand, feels at once purer and impossible to depict without chronicling all the forces working to dilute that purity.
This fascination with sports-office politics is all over the FX limited series Clipped. Despite a real-life NBA coach and multiple members of the Los Angeles Clippers serving as major characters, the occasional footage of basketball players on the court tends to feel out of place. For so many people involved in the team, it's almost beside the point.
Based on an ESPN 30 for 30 podcast, Clipped observes a decade-old scandal involving the Clippers’ owner from several angles. Doc Rivers (Laurence Fishburne) starts a new job coaching the supposedly cursed franchise, returning to a team he once played in as a pro. His new position involves working around the Clippers’ intractable blowhard owner Donald Sterling (Ed O’Neill), who enjoys owning the team a great deal more than the team actually winning games. That initial headache becomes a migraine when V. Stivano (Cleopatra Coleman), an assistant at Sterling’s foundation who also serves as a kind of platonic mistress to her boss, exposes a recording of him making racist remarks.
