Clipped Recap: From Side Piece to C-suite

“I love you, beautiful. Now go wait at the Chevron.”

That’s the sharpest line in this highly entertaining episode of Clipped, uttered by Donald Sterling to V. at night after she’s dropped him off at his wife Shelly’s place so the two can have an important chat. The subject of the chat is supposed to be Shelly’s lawsuit against V., seeking compensation for the $2.5 million in “gifts” that Sterling has paid his assistant/“friend”/maybe-maybe-not lover, but it turns into a longer and more emotional affair that Sterling expects and the lawsuit never comes up. Though the show does not cut back to V. at the Chevron, where she’s presumably waiting (and waiting) to chauffeur them back to their love nest across town, it’s easy to imagine the humiliating ordeal of a prideful 31-year-old getting stood up by the 79-year-old ghoul who holds her fate in his capricious hands.

One of the stronger aspects of Clipped is how it registers the fullness of V. as a character — her vanity, materialism, and vindictiveness on one end and her insecurity and vulnerability on the other. Shelly’s hostility toward her is now abundantly clear in the lawsuit, but to some degree, she’s collateral damage in a long-brewing marital crisis between the Sterlings. Her biggest mistake is violating an unwritten “mistress code” (as Ramona Shelburne calls it on the podcast), where her dalliances with Sterling are supposed to be discreet, not on embarrassing pubic display. But the gifts — a drop in the bucket for the billionaire Sterlings but life-changing money for her — are also part of 24/7 premium service she’s providing for him, and she believes she’s entitled to keep them.

The episode offers a couple of key conversations with her friend Deja (Yvonna Pearson), the one semi-major character who isn’t an actual person. Deja exists more as a sounding board for V., presented as a former MTV Spring Break veejay who knows enough about Hollywood’s brutal hierarchies to sympathize with V. dangling from the bottom rung. In the first scene, where she examines the lawsuit while in line at a fast food joint, Deja does her best to puncture her friend’s illusions, including V.’s daffy assertion that some of her income is from her work at the Sterling Foundation. But when the two of them start chatting in a dressing room, where V. has taken Deja’s advice to work her “blue chip pussy” on Sterling and “make him feel like a man again,” they get realistic about the transactional nature of the entertainment business.

Deja compares V.’s value as a Clipper to the men on the court: “They give you 15 years to earn,” she says. “Then you’ve got to find your own revenue stream. Lean In, like that bitch said.” The Lean In references nod to Sheryl Sandberg’s controversial bestseller from that year, which offered advice for women to empower themselves in the workplace, but in ways that critics felt reinforced the male-dominated status quo. But that’s the road map Deja thinks V. should follow. The famous “Laker girls” only make $85 a game, she notes, so whatever she can do to make money off her image and her body in that arena is not only fair game but a clock that’s ticking away. V. justifies it by asserting that Shelly is the real thief for ripping off tenants and not paying taxes, so this sort of moral relativism comes easy for her.

Clipped makes the dispute admirably complicated because Shelly’s dignity and flaws are also on full display, and the two women mirror each other in that their emotional well-being (and their conflict) is centered around the same terrible man. When Shelly works up the nerve to toss family mementos in the pool and have it out with Sterling over the V. situation, she’s expressing an authentic pain that he’s typically slow to comprehend, given the unconventional ground rules of their marriage. (“Honey, you’re jealous?” he asks incredulously.) It doesn’t take long for Shelly and her husband to cool off and reaffirm their commitment, with Shelly reminiscing about the time when she saw him “in white shorts on the parallel bars” and Sterling telling her sincerely that he’ll always be her husband. The next morning, the two are enjoying a couples massage (with a harpist!) by the pool, and it’s obvious that Sterling has not given a thought to V. waiting at the Chevron.

Meanwhile, in the lead-up to V. taking the fateful step of sending the notorious audio recording to TMZ, the Clippers are entering the Western Conference playoffs as the third seed, where they’re squaring off against the Golden State Warriors just before the Steph Curry/Klay Thompson/Draymond Green started winning NBA titles. For Doc, managing his own temperamental unit takes up plenty of bandwidth, even without having to deal with his boss. In a funny exchange with others in the front office — while Sterling is blathering for an hour on speaker phone over subjects ranging from runner-turned-murderer Oscar Pistorius to Joe Piscopo (“He looks embalmed!”) — Doc talks about handing Chris Paul’s OCD tic of needing to do everything in threes and about J.J. Redick’s routine requiring a baked potato at 4:30 every afternoon. When the subject of the TMZ tape gets raised as the team is en route to a crucial Game Three in Oakland, Doc has yadda-yadda-ed the particulars of its contents to such a degree that all he can say is, “TMZ is about to put out a tape of our idiot owner and his girlfriend. It’s not going to be a big deal.”

In that prediction, he’s extremely wrong, of course, as wrong as Billy Zane in Titanic declaring that that Picasso guy “won’t amount to a thing.” The strategy for Doc has been for him and the team to stick their heads in the sand, tolerate the predictable front-office shitshow under Sterling, and fulfill their championship potential. We know the tape will test that strategy, but the show does well to insert a scene where Elgin Baylor, the NBA legend and long-time general manager for the Clippers under Sterling, runs into Doc at the grocery store. No one has spent more time in the Clipper trenches than Baylor or come away as bruised by it, and he knows all about Doc’s stated goals of “managing” the hassles of working for Sterling while doing the job. Baylor can only offer these deflating words: “Some things can’t be managed.”

• Baylor was the general manager of the Clippers for 22 years, a staggering tenure that’s equally staggering for the team’s awful performance in that stretch (607-1,153), which would have gotten anyone else fired many times over. (Baylor did win Executive of the Year, however, in 2006, when they won their first playoff series since moving from San Diego and finished ahead of the Lakers in the standings.) Baylor’s treatment under Sterling led to a 2009 wrongful termination suit that the courts eventually rejected, but his tenure involved major restrictions on his ability to make draft and free agent decisions, and his pay was never competitive with other general managers in the league. That is a sad way to treat a legend.

• Having a random teenager run through the laundry list of “Clipper curse” fiascos for Chris Paul is a convenient way to dump some exposition, but CP’s response (“Your face is cursed”), followed by poor DeAndre Jordan clanking an arcade-ball shot, are nice touches.

• Kelly AuCoin as Andy Roeser is a casting coup. AuCoin has been reliably good and rangy character actor on various shows, but I particularly liked him as the meddling Pastor Tim on The Americans and as the hyper-aggressive broker “Dollar” Bill Stearn on Billions. Huge contrast between those men. Here, AuCoin’s interpretation of Roeser recalls Philip Seymour Hoffman in The Big Lebowski, a toadie trying to shrug his way through his boss’s noxious behavior.

• Also welcome to see Corbin Bernsen turn up as Shelly’s lawyer, Pierce O’Donnell, who did indeed get himself in legal jeopardy by devising creative ways to donate to John Edwards’ campaign. And his Art Buchwald book is supposed to be quite good! It’s on Buchwald’s famous suit against Paramount for allegedly stealing his idea for Coming to America.

• V. pushes back against Sterling for his abhorrent views on race, but TMZ would later reveal evidence that the real V. Stiviano was not so enlightened, which validates lines here like one where she wishes she could change the color of her skin.

• In other sad real-life developments, Glen “Big Baby” Davis, the backup Clippers player that Doc mocks for his weight during practice, was sentenced in early May to 40 months in prison over a scheme by former players to defraud the league’s health care plan.