What happened to V. Stiviano and Elgin Baylor?

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains details about the series finale of “Clipped,” now streaming on Hulu.

The emperor without clothes is still the emperor. That’s the ugly truth that FX’s “Clipped” gets at in the series’ final episode.

After Donald Sterling (Ed O’Neill) fails to stop his wife Shelly (Jacki Weaver) from claiming her husband is mentally ill and taking control of their family trust, Donald admits that the Los Angeles Clippers the dashing ex-Microsoft are sold. director Steve Ballmer. Donald will also stop fighting his lifetime ban from the NBA, which was imposed after TMZ published an audio recording of Sterling delivering a racist tirade to his assistant mistress V. Stiviano (Cleopatra Coleman) chastising her for publicly interacts with black people. .

For waving the white flag, the Sterlings will receive $2 billion from the sale of the Clippers: an exponential return on the $12 million Donald spent to buy the team in the 1980s. And after becoming much, much richer for the simple act of leaving, Donald is seen leaning back naked in his Malibu mansion, a copy of the Los Angeles Times spread across his pale crotch. Back to a functional marriage, Shelly reminds him of their dinner plans before picking up the newspaper, shaking her head with a “so sad” and dropping it back on the octogenarian’s genitals to reveal the Summer 2014 headline: “Ferguson is proving to be transformative.”

“It felt important to show that this tectonic experience that was happening across the country in the Sterlings’ world was just a carbon copy of the LA Times,” said Gina Welch, showrunner, executive producer and writer of “Clipped.” “This series follows a racial reckoning that was tied in a bow in the media narrative. But how could you begin to capture what happened that summer?”

It’s a particularly spicy note that sums up a retrospective omniscience at the heart of ‘Knipt’. The series often braved the uncanny valley: an undertaking that involves casting actors to play figures like Chris Paul and Steph Curry, with whom audiences have related for years. (The superlative example of this in the final episode – an actor playing Anderson Cooper – played like the show’s admission that it had been completely submerged through a bizarre looking glass.)

“The danger is that when writing a historical show that takes place ten years ago, you try to tell the viewer everything that’s going to happen next,” Welch says. But “Clipped” used that consciousness to sharply anachronistic purposes, especially in its recreations of decade-old meme formats that seem rather quaint and rudimentary compared to today’s online content. And with the show’s final gesture to the emerging Black Lives Matter movement, the producers aim to contextualize the spectacle of Donald Sterling’s cancellation (a term not yet entered into the public lexicon at the time) as the beginning of an American decade defined by political fragmentation.

“Recent news is that the ex-president and current candidate says he will work on ‘anti-white sentiments,’” says director and executive producer Kevin Bray. “[The events of this show] seems almost childish compared to an ex-president saying such nonsense. That’s part of the reason why that image of Ferguson exists in the show. Who could have ever fathomed what this would become?”

“This is in the early stages of modern athletes starting to speak out,” says producer and co-writer Rembert Browne, citing when the Miami Heat posed in hoodies to draw attention to the murder of Trayvon Martin, who was killed by a crime watch volunteer in 2012. “And we’re starting to encounter a Trump that we don’t know is coming. I show some people, like the Sterlings, who feel like, ‘Oh, Ferguson is something that’s happening there. That has no impact on us’, felt realistic.”

Earlier in the finale, Stiviano is left in the dust by the media circus she created. After a disastrous interview with Barbara Walters, she is sued by the Sterlings, who seize most of her assets, including the duplex Donald gave her. The series leaves her with a difficult coda, finding her on the steps of the Sterling estate, reminiscing about the proximity to the power she enjoyed before trading it for five minutes of fame. It’s one of many creative liberties the show took with Stiviano, whose fame during the scandal was largely limited to a handful of interviews and some paparazzi documentation.

“She was kind of heavy on IG. I had to introduce everyone to the Wayback Machine,” says Browne, explaining how he and the other writers scoured the Internet Archive to develop the role. “She left breadcrumbs behind, but many of those breadcrumbs have been removed over time.”

“We protect the views. There are differing opinions about whether Donald and V. had a sexual relationship, and who sent the tape to TMZ. I think the viewer may have different experiences with that question,” says Welch. “People can reasonably disagree about what really happened. And Cleo was so dedicated and such a big supporter of her character that it became a dialogue between us whether or not V. would say something in particular. From that point on, she really helped shape it.”

Coming to a conclusion for Doc Rivers (Laurence Fishburne) posed a whole different challenge. Unlike Stiviano and the Sterlings, Rivers has been a consistent presence in the media and the NBA since the Clippers scandal. Before that, he coached in LA for six years step down in 2020 after the team was eliminated in the conference semifinals, blowing a 3-1 lead against the Denver Nuggets. He then went to the Philadelphia 76ers, who never advanced beyond the semifinals during his three-year tenure. Now Rivers is the coach of the Milwaukee Bucks – another organization currently defined by star players and championship expectations.

“He has very clear dreams of greatness,” Browne said of Rivers. “Some of that was on his shoulders after he became a championship coach with the Celtics. A lot of that has probably been in his body for fifty years.”

“Doc eventually left the Clippers. You have to try to capture some of those things that the viewer knows will happen,” says Welch. “That was part of our idea in creating this story about Doc weighing what is enough for him. He has a championship from the Celtics. He had a great career as an NBA player. But something is still missing.”

In the finale of “Clipped,” Rivers gets some post-scandal satisfaction, admonishing Shelly at a restaurant for her devious sale of the team — a shameless act of financial ass-covering that also included some eyebrow-raising provisions like guaranteed parking and VIP passes, the strange official title of “Number One Fan” for Shelly, and the promise of three championship rings if the Clippers ever reach the top.

But in the final scene of the series, Rivers is reunited with Elgin Baylor (Clifton Davis), one of the great NBA players of his era and the longtime general manager of the Clippers. A flashback in episode 4 shed light on Baylor’s bitter departure from the organization. After years of trying to win under Sterling’s ruthless money grab, Baylor is offered a demotion from the front office. He threatens to sue the organization for wrongful dismissal and discrimination. (His lawyers dropped the charge of racism prior to trial; the jury subsequently ruled against Baylor’s claims of age discrimination and declined to award damages in 2011.)

Ultimately, everyone has to fight for their dignity within Sterling’s Clippers. But the producers wanted to give the last word to Baylor – one of Sterling’s oldest and most despicably treated victims (not to mention who-knows-how-many people suffered from his discriminatory practices as a property manager) and one of the few who publicly stood up to the billionaire, even as the NBA closed ranks to protect the team owner.

“I never approached this story from a concept of heroism. But to the extent that there is a hero, I think the privilege of the show is that it’s Elgin Baylor, and that’s why we end with him,” Welch says. “It’s the moment we give the arena back to the legend after everything that happened to him under Sterling’s ownership.”

“The people on the show have lived 10 years since then, and I think a lot of them are better for it,” Browne adds. “You learn from mistakes or missed opportunities. The life that came after is where the catharsis comes into play.

Back to Welch. “It will be available after the cameras are gone.”

All six episodes of “Clipped” are now streaming on Hulu.