IN THE SPACE OF FIVE DAYS, a man named Bill Maher, who hosts a late-night program called Politically Incorrect on the ABC network, underwent a kind of public nervous breakdown on national television. The spectacle had its voyeuristic fascinations, certainly. It’s not often you can watch a television personality deal his own career a fatal blow and then watch him try desperately to talk his way out of it. But the story of Bill Maher’s nightmare week is also an object lesson in the kinds of changes that are being forced on America’s entertainment culture as a result of the September 11 attacks. The nation is sobered, and show business is groping for ways to serve sober customers when for decades it has been dedicated to the proposition that the American people want to be inebriated by their entertainment.

LATE MONDAY NIGHT SEPTEMBER 17, six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Politically Incorrect returned to the air. (It had been preempted by news broadcasts the previous week.) On that episode, Maher said something that offended viewers. By midweek, he had lost two major sponsors. By Thursday, a significant number of local stations that carried the show had cancelled it outright or preempted it temporarily. By Friday, ABC was airing the show with no national sponsors whatsoever.

Over the course of the week, the subject of Politically Incorrect’s broadcasts became the future of Politically Incorrect and, not coincidentally, the future of Bill Maher. Maher used his network platform to express defiance, injury, cravenness, hurt, anger, terror, self-righteousness, pomposity, and puzzlement at his sudden transformation into a liability for his employers and a lightning rod for criticism. At one point, in an excruciating display of false modesty, Maher even offered himself up as a martyr to the national need "to vent." Several of the panelists on the program demurred. They suggested that were anything to happen to Bill Maher and Politically Incorrect, "the terrorists will have won."

But what will they have won?

The concept of Politically Incorrect is to give celebrities (mostly of the second and third rank) a chance to opine on current events alongside a pundit or two (usually of the hotheaded left or right). During Maher’s week of horrors, there were three celebrity panelists: the actresses Alfre Woodard and Laura Innes and the actor Stephen Collins. And in speaking about the current situation, they all looked pained, worried, and frightened. They were in way over their heads, and they knew it.

Here is what Woodard had to say about the war on terrorism: "We’re poised...on the brink of something historic in the world....We can start to move into the direction in the world where we can police ourselves. People have said, ‘What can we do, now is the time, they understand their vulnerability.’ We all like to have wars but this is something new."

We all like to have wars?

Upon hearing George W. Bush say "you’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists," Laura Innes complained: "I am far, far from being an expert. I’m an actress on a TV show. But we all sit here in terror of being thought of as unpatriotic....But my response to that particular quote, my reaction is, I admire his strength, I feel myself enormously patriotic, but I am so afraid of the polarization of that kind of remark....I fear that kind of didactic..." Innes trailed off.

Stephen Collins: "A week ago, I didn’t know Afghanistan was already in ruins!"

Here is the crux of the dilemma for ABC. Does a nation at war really want to hear even its most beloved celebrities opine on matters of life and death—not to mention the roots of terrorism, the terrain of Afghanistan, and the theology of the Taliban—when even a performer as able as Laura Innes doesn’t know the meaning of the word "didactic"? Can a broadcast network and its sponsors really take a chance on offending a population under attack, especially when the offense is being given on one of its least important and least-watched shows—and especially when the offense is primarily being given by the host himself?

The proximate cause of Maher’s self-inflicted injury was a remark he made about how, since the United States lobbed cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away back in 1998, "we’re the cowards." The opinion he was expressing, however crudely, is well within the range of acceptable opinion. But his tone, demeanor, and affect were not within the range of acceptable conduct for someone with access to network TV only days after an attack on the United States. Indeed, an examination of Maher’s program that night and on the nights that followed reveals that he had no grasp of what would be an appropriate tone for his show to take in the wake of the September 11 attacks.