Showrunner Gina Welch on filling in the narrative gaps of the Donald Sterling affair “in a way that implicated the viewer.”
When the team at Color Force, a production company that has partnered with FX on several series, reached out to Gina Welch about making a series focused on the downfall of former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, she wasn’t sure why they thought of her. “I had not been a big basketball fan,” the writer and producer admits. But she had written for other FX series based on true stories, including Feud: Bette and Joan and Under the Banner of Heaven. And she was intrigued by the dramatic story of Sterling’s swift ouster from the NBA following the leak of recordings that captured the real-estate mogul making racist comments.
“I was really, really interested in the aspect of this story that was about race and power in Los Angeles,” Welch says. “I understood that I was a good tonal match for the show because I tend to want to work on dark material with a lighter touch.”
Clipped is the rare scripted project about basketball that was shaped and envisioned by a woman, though Welch says she didn’t think about that as much as other factors. “The thing I took really seriously is that I did not have a long history as a basketball fan, so the burden was on me to do my research and get it right,” she says. “And I’m a white showrunner telling a story about race. Those were the two things I thought about in terms of the way I was building the show and doing my research and trying to enrich my point of view.”
The six-episode limited series concluded July 2 and was adapted by Welch from The Sterling Affairs, an ESPN 30 for 30 podcast about how the Clippers, led by coach Doc Rivers, navigated the 2014 playoffs after voice recordings confirmed that the guy who paid their salaries was prejudiced against Black people. In the finale, co-written by Welch and Rembert Browne, Sterling (Ed O’Neill) kicks and screams his way through accepting the sale of the team and a lifetime ban from the NBA, while the other characters — Rivers (Laurence Fishburne); Sterling’s wife, Shelly (Jacki Weaver); and his assistant and girlfriend, V (Cleopatra Coleman), who made the recordings — reckon with the ramifications of the upheaval.
The women of Clipped are as nuanced and central to the narrative as the men, which is why Welch and her fellow writers carefully considered their final moments in the series. How Doc Rivers processes the whole debacle is a key part of the finale, too, as is his relationship with LeVar Burton, who plays himself in the series, something he agreed to do only if Welch would allow him to “talk about my rage.”
Did you meet with Doc Rivers or any of the real people you were writing about?
Ramona Shelburne, who reported the podcast, opened up all of her interviews to me. I had hours and hours and hours of recordings to work from, but there were some gaps. I spent a lot of time talking to Doc before I started writing the show and then there were some other people who spoke, both on the record and on background, and a couple of people who didn’t want to talk.
In the last act or two of the finale, there are several significant conversations that take place. I want to start with the conversation between Doc and LeVar Burton. Are they friends in real life?
No.
How did that become part of the show?
In the writers room, we were bumping our heads against trying to figure out a character in the show with whom Doc could be his authentic self. He was on the cusp of separation/divorce from his wife. We didn’t feel he could be authentic with any of the assistant coaches or any of the players or, of course, anybody in the Clippers’ front office. When I asked Doc whom he was keeping counsel with at the time, he said nobody.
We thought it would be great to find someone to play themselves to add to that surreal quality you get in L.A., where you’re shopping at The Pavilions and you see Jean-Claude Van Damme. We wanted someone who was more or less at Doc’s station in life, who didn’t work in sports but occupied a similar place in the public imagination in terms of being a safe Black celebrity white people felt comfortable around. We had all these lists and we were trying to work through different ideas. Rembert Browne, a writer on the show who became a producer, called me from vacation in the Dominican Republic and was like, “What about LeVar Burton?” It took me a minute to understand how brilliant that idea was, thinking about the long arc of LeVar’s career and the way his public figure has changed from Roots through Star Trek. It was a great idea.
I called Laurence because we figured we were going to have our best chance of getting someone to play themselves if Laurence made the phone call. Laurence was like, “Yeah, I know him but I don’t think he’s going to do it. The kinds of things we’re talking about in the show are really not part of his public persona. But we do get together in the sauna pretty frequently where we talk about race.” I was like, “That’s been in the scripts for months — why has his name never come up?” It’s just this coincidence that Laurence was having similar conversations with LeVar in the sauna.
So Doc’s sauna conversation was initially not with LeVar?
It was just a placeholder, yeah. The conversations really changed once LeVar agreed to do the show. He was great. He read the scripts very quickly and called me, and then we met and his caveat was, “I’ll do the show as long as I can talk about my rage.” I was like, “Welcome to the party.”
Is it true that, as he tells Doc in the finale, LeVar has the chains from Roots hanging up in his house?
Yeah. He’s talking about the burden he has to carry, not just as a Black celebrity but someone who became a symbol, in multiple ways, that he was expected to quote-unquote live up to that were not very fair.
Why did you want to make that point at this moment in the story?
This episode for Doc is about the collapse of the idea he presents to the team in episode three, that in order to make an impactful statement,
you have to do it from a champion’s platform. As angry as you are in the moment, you’ve got to swallow it and play through because nobody’s going to listen to you unless you win. The reason we go from that idea in Doc’s storyline to episode four, the flashback to the moment he’s playing for the Clippers in 1992 and has his own anger roiling and gets the advice from his father to hide it, is to give context for the long history of that point of view. In order to succeed in a world that is dominated by white owners, you have to hide your rage.
Of course, at the beginning of episode six, they lose. They wind up with nothing: no platform, no moment where they can reflect on what happened to them mid-season. After the scene that Doc plays with Chris Paul, where I think you’re getting a sense of how the next generation of players is going to deviate from that history in the NBA, I wanted to give Doc and LeVar a moment to talk about the psychic cost of suppressing rage in order to succeed in a white world.
In the last scene where Doc has a conversation with former Clippers general manager Elgin Baylor, who filed a 2009 discrimination lawsuit against Sterling, the Clippers and the NBA, he seems to still be wrestling with his choice not to boycott. Did you get a sense that’s something he still contends with?
I think Doc is really proud of how he handled the team through this story. But I was also conscious of what happened in 2020 when Jacob Blake was shot by police during the NBA playoffs. There were boycotts and Doc gave a very tearful speech about feeling unloved by the country he loves. I thought, well, that is a different Doc than the one you saw in 2013. That transformation as a public figure informed that last scene, because in that last moment with Doc I wanted to suggest where he was going.
I watched the scene with Baylor a couple times and it occurred to me that maybe this is a conversation Doc was having in his mind with Baylor. Did you script it with the idea that they really did have this conversation?
Whether or not that’s an inner dialogue or an outer one is open to interpretation. But Doc really did invite Elgin back to Staples.
That last moment, when Doc closes his eyes and you hear the swish of the basketball going through the net, has a dreamlike quality. What did the swish mean to you?
I always knew I wanted the show to end with Elgin. That last line of his, “I need to shoot till it sounds right,” is a real quote of his. There was something that felt beautiful about ending the show in such a way that it’s about Elgin and the game. It takes the game away from the question of ownership and all the people involved who assert power over the players in the game. It removes them and restores the legend to the arena and the game to the legend.
Let’s talk about the scene in the restaurant where Shelly has a confrontation with Justine. Justine was a character you created for the show, right?
Yeah, a composite character. For Doc and V and Shelly, we wanted a confidante for each of those characters. I really wanted Shelly to have a friend who was trying to believe that Shelly, deep down, was a good person trapped in a bad marriage to a bad man. I thought having that person in scenes with her would sustain that dramatic question through the series rather than making us feel that what ends up happening in episode six is already playing in episode one. I also loved this very specific Malibu woman — her character description was turquoise jewelry, a little bit psychic, has spent some time in Taos, but hangs out with people who watch Fox News. That feels so California to me.
The first day Harriet Sansom Harris came to set, I came over to talk about her character and she had the whole backstory mapped out: “Justine has a Ph.D. in art history that she never uses.” She had a whole first marriage. Harriet is such an amazing character actress because she goes deep before she comes to set. She told me it’s because she never has the expectation that anyone is going to talk to her about her character, so she has to do the thinking on her own. The reality she brought to that woman and the way in which Justine allows you to keep hoping for a different result was really extraordinary.
That relationship highlights a different flavor of racism.
We had so many conversations in the writers room about how to dramatize Shelly’s variety of racism in a way that implicated the viewer. The danger in a show like this is that a white viewer looks at it and says, “Well, I’m not Donald Sterling, so I’m off the hook.” The thing I wanted in Shelly that points to where we’re really having problems as a country right now is that she’s a woman who doesn’t want to look at the ugly parts of life. She does not want to look at the ugly things she’s done. She does not want to look at the ugly things her husband’s done. She believes — and Shelly Sterling has said this in interviews — racism means overt violence. It means bad words, in quotes. She struggles to understand, and you see this in episode four, how their landlording policies constitute racism. That very convenient, willful ignorance and also the pleasure with which she accepted the role as the heroine of this story — those are the shapes that her racism takes.
There are a couple of times where the show makes references to Donald Trump. Was that intentional, to help people make connections between then and now?
Those references are there for a reason. We thought a lot about why this story was still important after January 6, when we were writing the show. In the first week of the room, one of the writers, Tracey Scott Wilson, was like, “We really need to talk about why this moment still matters.” That question ended up shaping the end of the show, because both episodes five and six happened during the Obama era, which feels like a very long time ago, particularly that Obama-era approach to racial reckoning — and really the whole history of our collective approach to racial reckoning. You get rid of one bad guy, and then the story’s over and everyone moves on. This story still matters after January 6 because there’s a relationship between that approach to confronting systemic racism and the rot and backlash we came to live in after 2016.
The confrontation between Shelly and Doc, when he refuses to let her buy his lunch: Was that entirely scripted? Did he ever have a conversation like that with her?
That was a scripted, fictionalized moment. The moment of her buying lunch for someone else — that actually happened. According to our research that happened to Blake Griffin. I loved that as sort of a final touch that shows you who she thinks she is in this story. She’s a benevolent owner.
There was a version where we didn’t have that confrontation, and it felt like, especially after we wrote that scene between LeVar and Doc, there needed to be an eruption within the frame of the show. LeVar was inviting him to show his anger. We needed to find a place to spell out the way that Shelly was actually walking away from the team, which is, she really didn’t lose that much.
The person I felt the most empathy for at the end of the series was V, because she has so much taken away from her and then ends up back in the same place she started, maybe even a lesser version. I’m wondering how you saw that character.
I think of her as a tragic figure, an incredibly enjoyable, entertaining, kind of profound and tragic figure. V’s relationship to fame and to her viral moment is really about the idea that fame is an avenue to power for people who aren’t born with it. She was compromised in all kinds of ways, like you see in episode five. She was incredibly conflicted in terms of her relationship with Donald and in ways that suggest sympathy for her situation. He helped her adopt kids. He’d been her employer for a long time. They just had a very knotted relationship that made it difficult for her to cut ties and speak clearly about who he was.
I always knew I didn’t want to see V until the back half of the finale. There was a lot of pushback on that idea because Cleopatra is so magical and V is really the connective tissue of the show in many ways. But I wanted the show to forget about her in the way that the other characters had forgotten about her, so when you land in her storyline and realize what’s happening with her, which is that she’s got financial struggles and she’s still facing this lawsuit, it’s a shock.
Did you ever have an opportunity to talk to V herself?
No, she did an interview for Ramona’s 30 for 30 podcast and Ramona approached her again when we started writing the show through her lawyer, Mac Nehoray, and she didn’t want to talk. I spoke with Mac Nehoray, who was still in touch with her and who gave me some really good information, but I did not speak to her directly. The thing that I understood was that V and Shelly, in a world like this, do not have their own avenues to power because women are sort of beside the point. They’re treated as either helpmates or sex objects. That was the exciting thing about being a woman and telling the story. I really wanted to make them feel vital and take their inner struggles seriously.
A hypothetical question: In a world in which the Donald Sterling affair happened now, do you think the players and the coaches would react differently?
It’s interesting because there have been some owner scandals in the last few years that did not get the same traction. Part of the reason this scandal blew up was the timing, because V was such a flamboyant, larger-than-life character. There had been articles on Donald Sterling’s racist housing practices and Elgin Baylor’s lawsuit for decades and nothing had happened. There is a certain singularity to the Donald Sterling story that makes me think it would be a big story today. But also, when I think about living in a world after January 6 and after neo-Nazis marching on Charlottesville with tiki torches, we’re living in a world where it feels like our ability to be surprised by racism has been dulled.
Do you think there would not have been as much outrage if it happened now?
I think there would not have been the same kind of performance of shock. That shock was genuine in some places and it was performed in others. That was part of what drove the speed of decision-making to ban Donald and the urgency to force him to sell the team — the fact that there was incredible public pressure that derived from the shock. I think we have since lost some of our ability to be shocked by the racist prerogatives of people in power.
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