Watching him has always been a guilty pleasure, like taking your id out to the park for a backed-up dump of anger and hostility, but Bill Maher’s season premiere at the end of a traumatic week persuades one watcher to take a small step for Mankind’s civility by clicking off the remote forever.
All that hyperbole now induces more guilt than pleasure in a time when point-scoring seems more beside the point than ever.
One of the admirable public figures of our time, Elizabeth Warren, is on to talk about financial regulatory reform, but Maher keeps goading her to raise the rhetoric, which she calmly resists, but is the indignity worth it? In her position, there are other venues where people listen rather than laugh, whoop and applaud.
But it’s the panels that take up most of the time and show Maher at his meanest, last night featuring the ragin’ Cajun act of James Carville and a screeching young woman belaboring a Republican strategist as the host eggs them on.
What’s really striking is the sudden drop in temperature during the “overtime” session when they stop playing to the TV cameras and answer questions from viewers. It’s as if they had all taken tranquilizers in the minutes between.
In a time when Jon Stewart is offering civilized political satire. combined with mind and heart, it will be only a small sacrifice to forego Maher’s “New Rules…”