HBO's Arli$$ Came Out 23 Years Ago and the Sports World is Still the Same

Back in 2015 there was an episode of American Dad on TBS where Stan and his daughter Haley are in New York and get tickets for "An Evening at Carnegie Hall With Robert Wuhl."  When they get to Carnegie Hall they find actor Robert Wuhl out front and he basically kidnaps them while he buys a lot of potato salad and eats it on the john.  When they make a break for it, he follows them with his pants around his ankles.

During all of this they made reference a few times to Wuhl's former series Arli$$ and joked how while it used to be on HBO, you couldn't even find it on HBO Go.  "It HBO Went," Haley jokes.  When I got HBO a few years ago I checked and it was true that Arli$$ was not on HBO Go--yet.

Fast-forward to this last spring when Game of Thrones was premiering the final season.  Sports comedian DJ Gallo Tweeted that if you watched a certain 4th season episode of Arli$$ on HBO Go or Now a glitch would start showing GOT hours before it was supposed to start.  I figured it was a prank--and it was--but it did tell me that Arli$$ had HBO Come to HBO Go.

Not that I really watched it at first.  I had some other stuff I watched until August when I finally got around to it.  And now finally we get to the title of the entry.  Arli$$ premiered in 1996 on HBO and along with some other show I can't remember was one of HBO's first forays into original TV series.  Before that they showed movies, comedy specials, and boxing but hadn't really done a lot of their own series.  So that other show and Arli$$ opened the doors for The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and of course Game of Thrones.

The premise of the show is that it focuses on Arliss Michaels, a sports agent who will do pretty much anything to get and keep his clients.  Not only does this involve negotiating with teams, there's also a lot of "servicing" to get them out of personal jams.  Those jams could be a cheating spouse, drug possession, a steroids test, or even hooking up with a transgender prostitute.

Arliss is aided by his friend Kirby, a washed-up former college quarterback with a gambling problem; his harried executive assistant Rita, played by Sandra Oh; and his head of business affairs Stanley, who frequently has to rein in Arliss's expenditures or money-making schemes.

And while the show is mostly a comedy and so the scenarios are punched up a bit, really the world of Arli$$ in 1996 isn't that much different than the sports world of today.  Athletes are still getting huge paychecks and with it comes the problems of living large:  groupies, kids out of wedlock, fans, and constant media scrutiny.  It's just that now thanks to social media there are even more headaches for an Arliss Michaels as athletes can get themselves into all sorts of trouble online.

Really the social landscape isn't all that different either.  In one episode Arliss is trying to get a contract for a black quarterback but no one wants him despite that he has good numbers.  He asks his "cousin" broadcaster Al Michaels if it's racial prejudice and Al tells him that teams think the quarterback is gay.  So Arliss stages a party that's raided by cops who conveniently find the quarterback in a hot tub with a couple of "underage" girls.  (The cops and girls all being set up ahead of time by Arliss.)  The next day the quarterback gets a big contract.  The moral of the story is that NFL teams would rather have a quarterback who bangs teenagers than one who's gay.  If you don't think that's still true, name one gay NFL player.  Yeah, there aren't any.  At least not openly.  A few years ago when college defensive star Michael Sam came out as gay he wasn't drafted until the last round and only then by his hometown team, the Rams, who cut him in the preseason.  Dallas picked him up for their practice squad as basically a favor to the league, but he never saw a minute of real playing time.  Was Sam, the Defensive Player of the Year in the ultra-competitive SEC, suddenly terrible at football?  Hurm.

In another socially-conscious episode in the 7th season Stanley's nephew (who was never seen or mentioned in the six previous seasons) is a top high school football player and has just about every college trying to recruit him.  A coach played by Keith David says that Stanley's nephew should play for a black coach because the way to get more black coaches is for a team with a black coach to win.  After the nephew commits to the school, though, the coach suddenly jumps to the NFL.  17 years later there still aren't many black coaches in college or the NFL.  And in fact hardly anyone complained last year when most of the black NFL coaches were purged in about 24 hours.  Or when the Lions fired their one black coach, Jim Caldwell, for an unproven white coach despite that Caldwell had the best record of any Lions coach in this century and his team was only a game out of a playoff spot.  And really this episode is a dual issue because you still have sleazy college coaches who jump to the NFL or another college, leaving the guys they recruited in a lurch.  Every year around bowl time you've got a new batch of coaches switching teams, leaving their teams in the hands of some assistant for their bowl game.  Yet of course players can't just jump from one school or the NFL whenever they feel like it.

The show even nailed fantasy sports, though at the time it wasn't done on computers.  Arliss and another guy in his league (played by Joe Pantaliano of The Sopranos) are so competitive that to keep his enemy from being able to use one really good pitcher, he arranges to have the guy traded to the Milwaukee Brewers, who at that time were in the American League, since their fantasy league only counted National League players.  The petty rivalry and obsession over stats and whatnot became a million times worse thanks to the Internet.

So basically while this show started 23 years ago it's still pretty relevant to today's world of sports.  The more things change, the more they stay the same, especially with sports leagues.

Anyway, this is a fun show not just for the humorous plots.  Since it was on HBO there's also boobs!  But I don't think you see any cock.  Sorry, ladies, you'll just have to look on the Internet for pictures of Robert Wuhl's dick.  But you do get to see his butt once or twice, so that's something.

While most of the time it's pretty much a sitcom (but without a laugh track) there were a few "very special episodes."  Like one where he helps an aging linebacker dodge a steroids test and then that linebacker nearly cripples a running back whom was about to receive a lucrative contract extension.  The fifth season premiere had Arliss passionately advocating a guy get into the baseball hall of fame because he played "the right way" but on the eve of the guy's induction his wife claims he hit her.  The guy's ex-wife comes forward to claim he was with her that night and Arliss works his magic to make the problem go away...except the ex-wife is really covering for him for the sake of their son.  And so at the end Arliss in a rare moment of conscience basically shuns the guy and refuses to go to his induction ceremony.  That same season there was one with Ed Asner as an aging baseball announcer whom Arliss finds out has Alzheimer's.  Eventually Asner decides it's time to step away from the mic; it made me think of those great old baseball announcers like legendary Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell, who was in Cobb with Robert Wuhl.  Sometimes they'd split the difference and have one serious plot and one comedic plot in the same episode like one where Kirby finds out he knocked up a woman whose daughter is about to be an Olympic athlete; meanwhile Arliss is shanghaied by an offense lineman to take his dead mother's hearse back to Phoenix--except it's not his mother in the coffin!

The show is fun too if you have any familiarity with sports because there are a lot of athlete cameos.  Most of the athletes have since retired and a few like Dale Earnhardt, "Macho Man" Randy Savage, and ESPN's Stuart Scott have since died.  Others like Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Roger Clemens went on to steroids-related infamy.  Some like Kobe Bryant and Floyd Mayweather were practically kids when they guest starred on the show.  Shaquille O'Neal was a hell of a lot skinnier too.  Since it was 1996-2002 you also have appearances from people who went on to other things like Michael Clarke Duncan as a Denver linebacker who gets stabbed by a Packers fan whose friend is played by Nick Offerman; Shannon Elizabeth played a young tennis player whom Arliss screws in the Biblical sense (not just the financial sense) until her coach-father fires him because she used two hands the racquet in a match; and if you watched the first season of Babylon 5, the psychic chick plays another of Arliss's conquests, a Madison Avenue exec who joins his team in the Biblical sense (not just the personnel sense).  Rifftrax favorite Wings Hauser appears in two episodes (including the series finale) as a former athlete turned coach--which wasn't really a stretch for him.  Star power!

It's ironic in one episode when Sandra Oh's character says she really wants to go to Napa Valley because just a few years later she was in Sideways, which was about wine tasting in the Napa Valley.  It's funny how things work out.

There are a few intentionally meta moments like when Arliss mentions in one episode he called the pitching coach of the Durham Bulls to try to get them to help woo a hockey team; Robert Wuhl played a Durham Bulls coach in Bull Durham.  In the penultimate episode of the second season Arliss undertakes a secretive mission to Atlanta to meet with Ted Turner to pitch a show based on his life for HBO; Turner sneers and basically says, "Who'd want to watch that?"  In another episode Arliss's brother is in a hospital and reading a Batman comic.  He asks Arliss what he thought of the movies and Arliss says, "I liked the first one but the rest sucked."  Because of course Robert Wuhl was in the first one but not the others.

Another Fun Fact is that Arliss's financial manager Stanley was played by Michael Boatman who appeared in most of the episodes but through the first four seasons was always listed as a "special guest star," probably because at the same time he was co-starring in Spin City on ABC with Michael J Fox and later Charlie Sheen.  And the weird thing is both shows ran for the exact same period, from 1996-2002.  That would suck to lose both of your paying gigs at the same time.  I hope he had a good agent.