Bill Maher plays a familiar role in the Season 2 premiere of The Terminal List: Bill Maher.
The new season of the Chris Pratt drama dropped on Prime Video this week, with the Real Time host appearing as himself for a two-and-a-half-minute scene, complete with the sort of pointed questioning and dry punchlines viewers of his HBO show will recognize. How he got there, it turns out, is a story of its own.
Maher’s scene finds him hosting a talk-show panel that includes Constance Wu’s journalist Katie Buranek, with the conversation eventually turning to Pratt’s James Reece. Maher challenges Buranek’s defense of Reece before ending one particularly grim exchange with a familiar deadpan: “Well, I can hardly wait to read your book.”
The appearance marks Maher’s first scripted screen role since he played himself in the 2019 film Late Night. Playing Bill Maher is hardly unfamiliar territory, though—he’s previously turned up as himself on shows including The Larry Sanders Show, Spin City, House of Cards, The Good Wife, and Black-ish.
As for how The Terminal List landed him, showrunner David DiGilio says series star Chris Pratt, who also produces the show through his Indivisible Productions banner and serves as one of its executive producers, deserves all the credit.
“I believe he may have traded a podcast performance to get Bill Maher to perform in our show,” DiGilio told ComingSoon.
He wasn’t kidding. Pratt appeared on Maher’s Club Random podcast in August 2025, more than a year before Maher’s Terminal List scene made it to air. And by the end of their conversation, the two were openly discussing the cameo Maher had yet to shoot.
“What’s my motivation?” Maher asked. “Am I me?”
“You’re Bill Maher,” Pratt replied, before walking him through the basic setup of the scene and telling him to approach it “in a way that only you can do.”
DiGilio said the production brought a small crew from the show’s home base in Canada to Los Angeles and filmed the sequence immediately after a Real Time taping.
“It was great to be able to shoot part of this show back in L.A.,” he said. “Bill was incredible. We did it right at the end of a taping. Constance jumped in there. Our other actor jumped in as well. And the man who just nailed his lines, Mr. Bill Maher, was incredible.”
Wu similarly told ComingSoon that Maher seemed perfectly at home.
“He was completely off-book,” she said. “He wasn’t nervous. He wasn’t anything. He was just himself, like how he is on the show, and he was great.”
Watch a clip from Maher’s scene in The Terminal List at the top of this post. The full episode is available for streaming on Prime Video.
