Earlier this year, Bill Maher seemed to make a dedicated effort to ensure that his Real Time show on HBO was as intolerable as possible, first by booking famous asshole Milo Yiannopoulos and then by casually dropping the n-word on live TV. Everybody forgot about the first thing after the second thing, but that second thing was bad enough that a number of people began calling for HBO to fire Maher. The network eventually released a statement, referring to Maher’s comment as “tasteless” and “completely inexcusable,” but now it looks like HBO may have overstated how “inexcusable” it thought the whole thing was.