‘Clipped’ Could Have Been A Documentary

The FX series on former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling doesn’t capture what made the real-life story so riveting.

Watching the new FX series “Clipped” made me nostalgic for a particular era of the internet. 2014 was a boom time for digital media and the peak of the blogging era. Lots of websites were publishing smart and snarky reporting and writing. Twitter, though not without its faults, was a place where you could actually have some robust conversations, rather than a pit latrine of conspiracy theories and sponsored content overseen by a manchild.

In the spring of 2014, the story of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling exploded onto the internet, when TMZ published leaked audio of him going on a racist rant, as secretly recorded by his assistant and girlfriend V. Stiviano. There was a lot of sharp and thoughtful writing and reporting on all angles of the story ― what it said about the NBA and professional sports as institutions, and how it also went way beyond that.

The Sterling saga yielded online conversations about an abundance of big subjects. People wrote all kinds of incisive pieces about race, gender, class, celebrity, labor, activism and housing policy. For years, Sterling and his wife Shelly had been stiffing and discriminating against Black and brown tenants in Los Angeles — not unlike another famous Donald on the other coast, who would run for president a year later. In addition to the serious discourse, people also had a lot of fun with the story, circulating jokes and memes on Twitter, a hallmark of this type of news cycle. (It also made an impression on me personally: As a junior in college at the time, starting to seriously pursue a journalism career, I have a distinct memory of the Sterling saga as emblematic of that era of digital media. Each day, I loved logging on to Twitter and finding the work of so many smart writers, dreaming of being part of it myself.)

The visual tapestry of “Clipped” is reminiscent of that time, such as how each episode transitions between scenes using scrolling Instagram feeds — specifically, Instagram as it looked in 2014. But the six-episode limited series, premiering Tuesday on Hulu, loses a lot of the necessary context that the internet gave the story at the time.

Based on “The Sterling Affairs,” a 2019 podcast from ESPN’s “30 for 30” series, the show would have worked better as a docuseries (perhaps on ESPN itself). By zooming out and featuring commentary from people who were involved in or covered the story contemporaneously, a docuseries could have brought more viewers into the enormous scope of this story and reflected on it a decade later. Dramatizing the Sterling saga in a prestige limited series, despite its many excellent performances, is an approach that’s unable to give the story the context it needs.