All six episodes of Clipped are now available to stream on Hulu, and the limited series gives viewers deeper insight into the scandal that shook the sports industry while exemplifying the widespread impact of social media. It begins when former NBA player, Doc Rivers, signs on as the new coach of the Los Angeles Clippers. However, he soon realizes that team owner, Donald Sterling, has been making discriminatory and racist comments towards his players.

Clipped is based on Ramona Shelburne’s podcast, The Sterling Affairs, which was released in August 2019. The podcast was the first step to something bigger, as Shelburne believed that Donald Sterling’s true-to-life downfall provided ample creative opportunities. She attributes its potential to the scandal’s key players, stating that they were each complicated enough to have stories in and of themselves.

Ramona Shelburne chats with Screen Rant about turning The Sterling Affairs podcast into a limited series and explains how Clipped showcases the power of the internet.

Shelburne Says That The Donald Sterling Scandal Is “More Than A Sports Story”

Screen Rant: To start off, I would love to go back to the beginning and know what first inspired you to create The Sterling Affairs podcast.

Ramona Shelburne: When I was covering the story, it always felt larger than life. It was more than a sports story. It was more than a scandal. There were these fun, interesting, complicated, tortured characters. Each one of them could have been a story in and of themselves. You start with Shelly Sterling or Donald Sterling, and they’re just fascinating and contradictory and awful and lovely. Obviously, I’m a sports writer, but I do a lot of feature stories. I do a lot of narrative.

While I was just living in it, everyone you would meet connected to the story. We just had all of these moments. You couldn’t make them up. You literally couldn’t be in a room with a bunch of writers in Hollywood and come up with this stuff better than what happened in real life. I came into it from a basketball journalist point of view of covering the Clippers.

Pretty quickly in reporting this, I said, “This is about a lot more than that. It’s about race and class and power in the NBA and power in the world. It’s about this misogyny that he has towards his wife and mistress. It’s about all the complicated relationships.” Why do they stay married for six years when he treats her like that? Why is V. in this position to take them down? It just had everything. When I sink my teeth into a story, I just keep going. I could have put it down at some point and just covered the news story, but it felt bigger than that. The podcast was the first step, obviously, into making what we have today.

Even though this is based on true events, what aspects did you want to expand upon and fictionalize to turn this into a limited series?

Ramona Shelburne: It’s interesting. I think it was really just the characters and the whole story arc of everything. I wrote a couple of magazine stories, and I captured a lot of it. I was a fan of The People v. O.J. I watched every second of that series. I watched everything FX and Color Force did in that limited series genre, and I just thought, “Wouldn’t this be great? Who would play Donald Sterling? Who would play Shelly? These are larger than life people.”

Usually when you cover a story like this, 20 years ago, the journalist would have written a book. Jeffrey Toobin wrote the book that The People v. O.J. is based off of. Nowadays, when you have a story like this that feels bigger than life, or feels bigger than the news as it happened, you do a podcast afterwards. It just had so many elements to it about how Los Angeles works, how power works, how men like Donald Sterling rose to the top of the world and controlled people and controlled their team.

I felt like it had all the elements to be a big, giant story. I do radio in Los Angeles. I’m comfortable in that medium. I felt like the podcast would be a great vehicle to tell that story in a different way, rather than just write those types of stories in real time. You can’t capture the depth and the absurdity and all the different levels of it in one magazine story. There’s just too much to it, as you see now as you watch clips.

Doc Rivers Wasn’t Involved In The Sterling Affairs Podcast

Doc Rivers is onboard as a consultant, so how was working with him? Did you get to have conversations with anyone else who lived through this?

Ramona Shelburne: That’s an interesting story. Doc wasn’t involved in the podcast at all. I interviewed him for the podcast, but he had no idea that it would ever be made into anything like this. I’m obviously an executive producer and consultant, so they would ask me a lot of questions about Doc’s role. They understood how important he was to the story. There were a lot of details of, like, “What exactly did he say in those meetings? When did he know this? When did he know that?” It was all these background, things that, frankly, I didn’t know.

I go, “Look, I know a lot of the story. I’ve talked to Doc, and I’ve talked to a lot of the players. But if you’re going to center so much of the story on Doc, you probably want to call him and involve him yourself.” Journalistically, I felt like I had to get out of the way there. I’m covering him as a coach of the Sixers, so I can’t be involved in the brokering of that relationship. I would tell them as much as I knew, and I gave them as much information that I had from talking to players and him, but I give that credit to Nina Jacobson and Nellie Reed of Color Force.

Theysaid, “We need more access to Doc than what was in the podcast.” The person who worked with Doc was Gina Welch, the writer. I think she did tons of phone calls with him just asking the writerly type of questions that she needed. I wouldn’t have had those answers. I think she really valued his perspective. We obviously talked to a lot of people for the show, but I think for the level of interest they had in Doc, they had to set that up themselves. You’d have to ask her more about how it was working with him. I sort of stayed out of that lane.

Donald Sterling’s remarks were made public because of social media. Speaking creatively, how did you and the Clipped team go about showcasing the power of the internet?

Ramona Shelburne: It’s really interesting. You have to go back to 2014 to understand how new internet culture was at the time. We all were just getting on Twitter and Instagram. It wasn’t brand new, but the power of it was still coming online. The idea of something going viral was pretty new—especially this idea of an audio recording or tape that you made of somebody. I hit on this in The Sterling Affairs, but Donald had had other mistresses. He had had other girlfriends or assistants. There was one in particular, Alexandra Castro, who had a very similar lawsuit to the one that Shelly filed against V. Stiviano that sort of kicks off the action here.

V. had audio recordings that she could make on her cell phone, whereas when Castro tried to record him, they had VHS. You didn’t have a cell phone back then. You didn’t have the right medium. For me, a big theme of the show, and a theme of this story is how the world has changed. Why was V. Stiviano the mistress that took him down? Well, she had a cell phone. Nobody else had a cell phone that could record things like this. You also had internet culture where it wasn’t just a one day story in The Times. I think Gina wrote this scene really perfectly when Andy Roeser comes to him and first says, “V. sent a recording,” and Donald is very unconcerned because it’s a voice recording. He thought it’d be a one-day story in the newspaper. He didn’t understand the power of the internet at that time.

Also, you had TMZ, which is a fairly new entity in the celebrity world. It’s an outlet that would take a tape like that and just run it. If they leaked that to ABC News, or CNN or something later, would it have been as big of a story ten years earlier? Would that have come out the same way? I don’t know. I think it’s a confluence of how the world had changed pretty quickly and dramatically in 2014 from the world that Donald Sterling had owned. He uses this line a lot in the show: “It’s my world.” It had been his world. He had a good understanding of how to control that world, but after a while, he didn’t keep up with how quickly things had changed.

The Clipped Creatives Wanted V. Stiviano To Be Played By A Lesser-Known Actor

You have an incredible cast here. What did they bring to these characters that surprised you?

Ramona Shelburne: All of them are just so phenomenal. They’re all so good. I wasn’t as involved in the casting as Gina was, but she would tell me how things were going. They really looked long and hard for somebody to play V. They really wanted this to be a breakout role for somebody. V. was an unknown. She just became V. Stiviano. They wanted to find somebody who also matched that. I feel like with Cleo, she brought V. Stiviano to life in a way that I don’t think I was able to do in the podcast. V. and I have subsequently talked in the last few months, but she didn’t do the podcast. She wasn’t interested in doubling down and explaining herself.

We had a couple of interviews she gave at the time, and she did a podcast a few years later where she explained things, but there really wasn’t a lot for us to go off of with V. other than just research. She was the one major character that didn’t really participate. I fleshed her out in the podcast, but not nearly as well as Gina did in the show. Cleo just brings this other dimension to V. that I think is incredible. To me, Cleo is just this breakout star. I hope this launches her career into the stratosphere. She just did such an amazing job with this profoundly weird but fascinating character.

What do you hope people take away from this after learning about what happened on the Clippers team?

Ramona Shelburne: This is one of the first scandals that changed our world and [showed] how powerful people can be brought down by people who are not powerful. That’s the opening speech V. gives in the show. There’s this idea that, especially when you have money, that you can control people, that you can control the world. We’ve seen a reckoning with that over the last 15–20 years where there is a limit on how much you can control and treating people really poorly and behaving in that manner. There is a recourse now. That’s one of the speeches that Donald gives. It’s one of the things he says: “This is just the way the world is.”

That’s how he would describe it to be in that tape, and I don’t think that’s how the world has to be. We’ve seen powerful people fall who’ve said bad things or done bad things in the last 15–20 years. I think people are just now starting to understand. Having covered the NBA very deeply for most of my career, we went through this in a bubble. The players actually walked out. There was a protest where they didn’t play playoff games, they didn’t play games. I remember covering the Milwaukee Bucks—they were the first team to do that—and talking to some of the people with the Bucks and the players on the team, and they staged this boycott after Jacob Blake was assaulted.

It was like, “What are we asking for with this protest? How are we trying to use our power to effect change?” We have to name specific goals. Now there are mechanisms to create change, but a lot of people who have learned how to use those mechanisms have to figure out what they want to do with that power now. When you take some of the power back, now you have to figure out what to do with it. I think that’s a real fascinating point where we are in our journey as a country and especially in professional sports.

About Clipped

FX’s Clipped takes you behind the scenes of a notorious NBA owner’s racist remarks, captured on a tape heard around the world. Based on the hit ESPN 30 for 30 podcast The Sterling Affairs, this limited series charts the collision between a dysfunctional basketball organization and even less functional marriage, and the precipitating tape’s impact on an ensemble of characters striving to win against the backdrop of the most cursed team in the league.

Check out our other interviews with the Clipped cast and crew:

• Laurence Fishburne
• Gina Welch, Rembert Browne, & Kevin Bray
• Ed O’Neill, Jacki Weaver, & Cleopatra Coleman

All episodes of Clipped are now available to stream on Hulu.