Bill Maher Wraps Up a Few Thoughts

You could cast a dozen Hollywood blockbusters with the celebrities who never did “Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher.”

The show, which debuted on Comedy Central on July 25, 1993 (guests on the first broadcast were Jerry Seinfeld, Larry Miller, Robin Quivers and Ed Rollins), moved to ABC in 1996. It was canceled a month ago, to be replaced weeknights at 12:05 a.m. with a show hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. But that program won’t debut until after the 2003 Super Bowl; in the interim, ABC will run an extended version of its 11:30 p.m. “Nightline.”

Maher’s last show is Friday, when he will have on “the four best friends I made from the show”: Arianna Huffington (who will have done the show 42 times), Christopher “Kid” Reid, Ann Coulter and Michelle Phillips.

This is not a booker’s dream, but then, it has always been thus for a talk show that asked its guests to have an opinion, all while someone like Ted Nugent was free associating into their left ear.

Publicists worried that star clients would misspeak, get insulted or, worse, appear bereft of thought as a conversation went whizzing over their heads. For Hollywood, the business at hand--plugging the movie, the CD, the TV series, yourself--was more easily accomplished on any number of more high-profile talk shows. Plus, Maher could be cantankerous and unpleasant. He could never bring himself to watch the show, he said, but evidently he would look disgustedly at his guests.

Over lunch recently, as he prepared to take “a long vacation,” Maher played a game of “Did the Celebrity Ever Do Your Show?”

Julia Roberts? No. Jennifer Aniston? No. George Clooney? Once. Brad Pitt? Close, around the time of “Fight Club,” but no. Matt Damon? No. Ben Affleck? “Ben Affleck is truly a great guest,” Maher said, brightening. “Even if he was the third lead on a crappy sitcom, I would say, ‘Rebook him.’ ” Gwyneth Paltrow? No. Bill Murray? No. Dustin Hoffman? No. J.Lo? Maher laughed. John Travolta? “He took five minutes one night to tell me he watches it. He at least made an effort to tell me why he felt uncomfortable.” Jim Carrey? “Those are the ones that really hurt,” Maher said. “Robin Williams has never done the show. All my comic buddies.” Madonna? “She wasn’t even very nice when I asked her,” Maher said. “I asked her at a party once.”

Last spring, as the show was dying on the vine amid ABC’s attempts to woo David Letterman from CBS, Barbra Streisand (who also never did the show) issued a statement from her Malibu compound, calling “Politically Incorrect” “an important forum for the dialogue that is the foremost foundation of democracy.”

Maher, who called Streisand “a wonderful patron of the show,” said he understood why the star never actually came in-studio to participate in this “foundation of democracy.” “She is a perfectionist about everything; it’s not a situation she can control. And as a control freak myself, I do understand.”

Tonight, Maher will be honored by the L.A. Press Club. On the one hand, it’s a bit difficult to cast him as a First Amendment martyr, given that he lasted five years on Walt Disney-owned ABC, which didn’t like it when he talked up drugs but otherwise gave him a pulpit. Maher, 46, still has a soapbox in stand-up comedy (he continues to tour). He insists he’ll be back on television in the near future but declined to offer specifics, hinting a deal was in the works (HBO is his rumored next home).

Regardless, Maher said he feels the “Politically Incorrect” format has been played out and that 22 minutes is too confining. He disagrees with the perception that he grew more arch, that the Comedy Central years were freer in spirit and easier to watch.

What he’s decided is that people want a more streamlined program, more of Maher talking about the president and less, say, of Carrot Top talking about the president. He gets a lot of feedback when he does CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Maher said. “What I’m gonna do is to purify it more, so that there’s a little less clutter,” he said. “I think that’s what the audience is telling me. A little less clutter.”

In a preamble on the show last month, in the days after his cancellation became official, Maher outlined some of the views he’s espoused over the years--the ideology that, by degrees, moved him away from Bill Maher the comedian to Bill Maher the network nuisance and iconoclast.

“I think America causes cancer, longevity is less important than fun, and young people should be discouraged from voting.... I think children are not innocent, God doesn’t write books and Jesus wasn’t a Republican.... “

He is against “Big Food” (“Food is never neutral. It’s either helping you or hurting you,” he said) but not for suing Big Tobacco. Maher, presumably, could take this act to cable, home to any number of political chat shows and shouting heads, and where pulling in fewer than 1 million viewers a night is not necessarily a problem, provided you perpetuate media attention and “brand” your network.

“I do have more original, better takes on any issue that comes along than I find anywhere else in television,” Maher asserted. “People who comment on television say the same predictable, doctrinaire things.”

Maher’s unpredictability has brought its share of trouble. On-camera and off, he can be uncouth with the best of them. Last year, he drew an analogy between pet dogs and retarded children, saying “they’re sweet. They’re kind. But they don’t mentally advance at all.” He later apologized.

And on Sept. 17, of course, on his first broadcast after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Maher touched off a bigger backlash when, countering the notion that the hijackers were cowards, he said of the U.S. government’s military strategy: “We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.”

Maher had run afoul of sponsors and affiliates in the past, but his Sept. 17 remarks--delivered in the face of the nation’s trauma--seemed to signal he’d overstayed his welcome. Sears Roebuck & Co. and FedEx Corp. pulled their ads, and some ABC affiliates--most notably the one in Washington, D.C.--refused to air the show.

Whatever goodwill remained between “Politically Incorrect” and ABC vanished as well. With the show’s contract up for renewal, divorce was in the air, anyway. Amid regular management shuffles at the network, “Politically Incorrect” had lost the executive who brought it to ABC years ago--a key reason for its demise, insiders say.

But after Sept. 17, Maher said, he was officially regarded as “the crazy aunt in the attic” by ABC. After some prodding, the network issued a statement saying it is “extremely proud of the fact that, for the past five years, ABC has afforded Bill Maher a national platform for his unique take on the world,” calling the show’s run both “challenging” and “rewarding.”

“I don’t have any animosity toward the network,” he added. “I knew who I was dancing with when I accepted the date.” His show’s ratings had shown some attrition--down from a little more than 3 million viewers in 1996-97 to about 2.5 million viewers in 2001-2002, according to Nielsen Media Research.

After losing out on Letterman in the spring, ABC grabbed Kimmel, of Comedy Central’s “The Man Show,” hoping to create a more profitable, younger-skewing show. While “Nightline’s” Ted Koppel refused to tease “Politically Incorrect,” ABC is hoping Kimmel will pull in viewers even less apt to be watching the network at midnight.

Predictably, Maher pits the evolution of his show alongside the devolution of the networks. And he wonders how a show as substantive as his can fit in the current climate in network suites.

“I don’t think the broadcast networks know where they’re going,” he said. “They have this schizophrenia where on the one hand they’re very snobby, because I’ve pitched them various shows over the years, and they’re very snobby. And on the other hand they put on the most base sort of reality [shows], basically torturing people for money. So, they’re hypocritical and schizophrenic, and more than that I think they’re in a panic. They don’t know what to do.”

Not everyone, of course, regards the death of “Politically Incorrect” as proof that the networks are disengaged from serving the public trust.

Matthew Felling of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank in Washington, said those who consider “Politically Incorrect” vital to political discussion probably feel “Bulworth” should be shown in political science classes.

Still, Felling said: “All the experts talk about blurring the line between news and entertainment. And ‘Politically Incorrect’ embodied that blur, for better and for worse. It brought with it the merit of news and it brought the mindlessness of entertainment. But it has to be commended for trying.”

“Politically Incorrect,” Maher said, was not simply about trying to get celebrities to expound on abortion. He pointed to the citizens’ panels the show did one year.

“One guy said we should napalm the border to stop immigration,” Maher recalled. “You’re not going to get that out of Sharon Lawrence.”