The FX Donald Sterling Show is rightfully trashy

You can't really talk about “Clipped” without mentioning “Winning Time,” so you might as well put the comparison aside. The FX limited series bills itself as “the scandalous story of Los Angeles' other basketball team,” nodding to the Lakers' seemingly permanent status as second banana since their move to the city in 1984. Sure enough, the Lakers were the first to get the prestige TV treatment, an HBO drama with an all-star cast, Adam McKay as executive producer and an epic, fearsome scope. (The series began with a flash-forward to 1992, then ended its first season in the spring of 1980.) “Winning Time” also ended abruptly, without ever having the chance to complete its sprawling story of a decade of sporting domination.

“Clipped” lowers its ambitions, largely to its benefit. The series is limited to just six episodes and a series of quick, specific events: the 2014 release of a recorded conversation between Clippers owner Donald Sterling (Ed O'Neill) and his assistant/mistress/arm candy/ “dumb bunny” V. Stiviano (Cleopatra Coleman), leading to Sterling's ouster after the appalling racism expressed on the tape sparked a massive outcry. In another example of poetic overlap, the initial subject of Sterling's anger was a photo Stiviano took with '80s Lakers star Magic Johnson — and, yes, “Winning Time.”

Adapted from showrunner Gina Welch's ESPN podcast “The Sterling Affairs,” “Clipped” captures the end, or perhaps the ever-present underbelly, of the dynamic widely celebrated by “Winning Time.” Sterling and longtime Lakers owner Jerry Buss were both regional real estate moguls in the Southland — objectively wealthy, but small compared to the tech barons and ownership groups that would succeed them. (Literally, in the case of Sterling selling the Clippers to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for a cool $2 billion.) Buss is remembered as a maverick, an interloper sharp-elbowed guy who infiltrated the NBA-owned country club and led the Lakers. to victory. Sterling, now 90, is considered a greedy monster who strained his team with active disregard for his employees. It is always risky to subject an organization to the whims of one man; here again, certain behaviors considered tolerable in a previous era no longer stand up to the harsh light of the present. Buss was also a notorious womanizer, although he was largely beyond the reach of an iPhone. He died in 2013, just a year before Sterling's fall from grace.

“Clipped” tells a sordid story about sex, money, race and fame, and much of it takes on an appropriate tone next to the soap. To the extent that this story has heroes, Welch and his writers focus on Doc Rivers (Laurence Fishburne), the famous coach responsible for reversing the team's fortunes against Sterling's best efforts. Rivers and his players – condensed to starters Blake Griffin (Austin Scott), Chris Paul (J. Alphonse Nicholson), DeAndre Jordan (Sheldon Bailey), Matt Barnes (Sarunas J. Jackson) and JJ Redick (Charlie McElveen) – are the most sympathetic victims of Sterling's disgusting diatribes, forced into an impossible choice: either continue to make money for a man who considers them subhuman, or sacrifice their income and opportunities as a result of his actions. But the real conflict in “Clipped” is a tug-of-war between amoral operators at best, as sensitive to their own interests as they are blind to their failures: Stiviano, Sterling and Sterling's wife, Shelly (Jacki Weaver).

Besides the looming shadow of the Lakers, a tabloid frenzy in the Los Angeles sports world inevitably conjures up the specter of OJ Simpson. In dramatizing the Simpson trial, the first season of “American Crime Story” skillfully balanced the modest elements of its story with its tragic and eternally resonant themes. “Clipped” is a little more unbalanced. O'Neill is deliciously repugnant as a troglodyte whose bigotry and crudeness are so over-the-top that you can't help but laugh. Rich Sommer and Kelly AuCoin add even more levity as the hapless servants try and fail to clean up Sterling's mess in real time, and Weaver gives Shelly a deceptive sharpness, adapting like her character from innocent old lady to savvy operator , depending on what is appropriate. her. Save for an ill-advised flashback episode that stops the season in its tracks for unnecessary exposition, “Clipped” moves at a brisk, breathless pace, channeling the feeling of current events spiraling out of control.

“Clipped” is less confident as it moves from beat-by-beat madness to its big conclusions. With the exception of Sterling, every major character has a confidant who acts like an angel on their shoulder: Justine (Harriet Sansom Harris), a woman who has actually left her rich, loathsome husband and who is pushing Shelly to do the same; Deja (Yvonna Pearson), an ex-VJ who advises Stiviano on the fleeting nature of fame; incredibly, LeVar Burton as himself, another black celebrity who spends his steam room sessions with Rivers discussing the tightrope of remaining acceptable to a mass audience without betraying his roots. As valid as their arguments may be, all three act more as spokespersons for a current point of view than as people as plausibly flawed as their selected films.

Meanwhile, a closed-door debate among the Clippers over whether to take the court after taping turns into a Socratic dialogue about athlete activism. (The scene climaxes with Rivers playing a clip of Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists at the 1968 Olympics.) Stiviano remains an enigma, preserved in amber behind his iconic face-hiding visor and played by Coleman with petulance childish. It appears most strikingly when “Clipped” presents its many contradictions without explaining them: a woman who denied her own blackness while sparking a conflagration around anti-Black racism; a shameless lover of ephemeral and material things who adopted two young boys in the middle of her 15 minutes. When she's shown watching Kim Kardashian's wedding as an instructional video, it's an overly simple view of an erratic woman, unknown even to herself.

Like “Uncut Gems” before it, “Clipped” is the strangest of beasts: a period piece set in the relatively recent past. Interstitials display basic block-text memes in Instagram's decade-old interface; Rivers receives a private call from then-President Obama. This approach revives the kind of small details that fade over time. Do you remember that the two rivers And NBA Commissioner Adam Silver (Darin Cooper) was brand new on the job, facing an existential threat to his organization before he even had a chance to establish his authority? Or that the tape leaked in the middle of an extremely rare playoff series for the Clippers, who were pitted against the Steph Curry-led Golden State Warriors in the first round? Even before Welch and his writers had to craft a compelling narrative, history did it for them.

But “Clipped” also exists halfway between short-term and long-term memory. Implicitly, Sterling's situation is being framed as a precursor to the 2020 NBA walkouts that followed the killing of George Floyd and the shooting of Jacob Blake. Arguments about actors' actions and their possible impact are framed in terms much broader than the particular dilemma at hand. Should the Clippers have done more than silent protest? Did Sterling's exile do anything to change the system that supported him for decades? “Clipped” cannot answer these questions; the NBA and its stakeholders still have not done so. He can only devote himself to the task of recreating an absurd and infuriating moment. In athletics as in art, narrow focus pays off.

The first two episodes of “Clipped” are now streaming on Hulu, with the remaining episodes airing weekly on Tuesdays.