HBO Goes to Hell

Last summer at the TV critics' tour, there was a minor brouhaha when a reporter charged that many of the TV journalists left a conference room before the presentation by Roger Ailes of Fox News--the implication being that liberal TV critics were staging a walkout against the conservative Ailes.

Conservatives who were offended at the time would have enjoyed the HBO presentation today. After a packed crowd sat for the first two panels, probably a third or so left the room before the panel on Friends of God (the documentary on fundamentalist Christians by liberal Alexandra Pelosi, Nancy's daughter).

The fact is, press tour sessions are packed back-to-back-to-back, and critics will often take off to write or do other business during sessions they figure they can afford to miss, politics notwithstanding.

That said, there's no denying that HBO is not exactly red-state territory. Somebody asked Pelosi whether being the daughter of the Democratic Speaker made it hard to get access to Christian groups. "It was a lot harder to walk into a church and say, 'HBO,'" she said. "They call it 'Hell's Box Office.'"

After her, diehard libertarian comic Bill Maher pretty much made her subjects' case for them. Asked to comment about President Bush's surge plan in Iraq, Maher said it was a sign of "arrogance on a level that I think you can only get from faith." Later, he added: "I understand that [Bush] prayed a lot about Iraq. But I don't think that he learned a lot. Maybe the American people will learn a lesson from this the next time they go to the polls. Vote for the guy who reads, instead of the guy who prays."