I decided to quickly write a column after I kept receiving phone calls, emails and text messages from friends thanking me for Sinclair having preempted “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” I retired last year and had no role in the preemption decision I told each well-wisher.
I also thought I would set the record straight on what I believed happened. The political left is convinced President Donald Trump ordered ABC to cancel Kimmel. No, he did not. Figuratively speaking, Jimmy Kimmel had long ago signed his own death warrant.
Some of the conclusion that Trump was behind ABC’s indefinite suspension of Kimmel stems from what appears to be the coincidental timing of comments by Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr. I am confident Carr’s remarks had no bearing on the matter. I suspect the die was already cast regarding Kimmel’s future on ABC long before Carr spoke.
I know senior leadership at Nexstar and Sinclair. They are the two TV station groups that decided to preempt Kimmel hours before ABC publicly announced it was taking action to sideline Kimmel.
To be clear, the following is speculation on my part. I have not spoken with executives at any company on this matter. I suspect the Nexstar & Sinclair preemption decisions nudged ABC to move forward with indefinitely suspending Kimmel. It’s likely the final nail in the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” coffin will be hammered into place in the very near future.
I have a hunch the ABC network had been working on an exit strategy to end “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” for quite some time. The sense of urgency may have picked-up after CBS decided to end Late Night with Stephen Colbert. To be precise, Colbert was not cancelled and immediately tossed on the streets, as some apparently believe. CBS made what appears to have been a long, thoughtful decision to end the program at the end of the current season in May 2026. Colbert was given 10-months notice his show would come to an end. It was no different than ending the run of Cheers, Seinfeld and Friends.
Complicating matters for ABC regarding Jimmy Kimmel’s insensitive remarks was its news division was in the midst of negative public reaction to senior reporter Matt Gutman portraying text messages between the Charlie Kirk assassin and his transgender partner as “touching.”
Gutman’s favorable characterization of Kirk’s alleged shooter Tyler Robinson is not much different from other media outlets that gushed over perpetrators, or attempted to portray them as the victims. In a 2001 special news segment, Katie Couric fawned over Andrea Yates, the mother who drowned her 5 young children, and then encouraged viewers to donate to Yates’ criminal defense fund. Rolling Stone magazine romanticized Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev when it placed him on a 2013 cover, and Couric and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos partied with Jeffrey Epstein at his Manhattan mansion after his 2009 release from prison as a sex offender.
Last year, NPR produced a segment that appeared to idolize Luigi Mangione who has been charged with the murder of a health insurance CEO.
The end of Colbert’s program was an easy one to make, and was long overdue. CBS was losing $40 million annually on Colbert. That’s nearly $800,000 lost each and every week. This is not an insignificant amount of money. Even for CBS.
Once upon a time, late night shows like these were very profitable. However, audience ratings for Colbert, Kimmel and the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon over the last several years have been in freefall. Several reasons contribute to their audience demise including increased competition from multi-channel services such as cable and satellite, streaming services, internet, and viewers voting with the remote and changing channels or turning off the TV because they disliked the content.
Sanctimonious media who argue humor is off-limits for criticism forget that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer hosted a 2009 segment that attacked Saturday Night Live for daring to air a comedy sketch that made fun of Barack Obama. CNN even had the head of PolitiFact add gravitas to the segment when it published a “fact check” criticizing the comedy program for lampooning Obama.
CNN and PolitiFact were not alone in going apoplectic over Saturday Night Live having fun at Obama’s expense. In 2014, the Washington Post “fact-checked” another SNL skit, declaring the comedy skit “wrong.”
There was a time when audiences laughed with late night hosts Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and others. The political viewpoints of these hosts were a mystery to viewers. They would playfully make fun of just about anyone. It was nearly always good-spirited.
Colbert and Kimmel were the opposite. Instead of good-spirited, they were angry and bitter. Whereas Carson, Leno and O’Brien could make light of a public figure’s predicament, Colbert and Kimmel could be vicious and cruel. Carson, Leno and O’Brien would harvest a joke from a daily news event at which everyone could laugh, including the subject of the joke. Colbert and Kimmel looked to draw blood with a mean-spirited political statement. Colbert and Kimmel sought applause, not laughs from the like-minded liberals who comprised their audiences. They were comfortable with alienating half of the country because they considered that half to be comprised of ignorant, racist, uneducated rubes. The parent networks were comfortable with looking the other way as long as the programs made money.
But then the money well ran dry.
CBS made the obvious call this past July because Colbert’s show was hemorrhaging cash. According to television industry sources, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” has also been losing tens of millions of dollars each year. The damage from Colbert and Kimmel did not affect only the networks. Colbert and Kimmel’s shows had become toxic with a growing number of affiliates. Local advertisers didn’t want to buy commercials in those programs. It’s the age-old supply-and-demand issue. Reduced advertiser demand forces the affiliates to discount the price of their commercials. One CBS GM told me the CW affiliate in his market was drawing a larger audience showing wrestling reruns. “Colbert is killing us,” he told me. Colbert and Kimmel were becoming increasingly bad for business.
There is little doubt the toxicity of the show contributed to decisions by local broadcasters Nexstar and Sinclair to yank Kimmel. Neither station group owner wanted to be answering audience phone calls with complaints.
Kimmel’s remarks were far from the worst that have been said regarding the Charlie Kirk assassination. Kimmel’s comments were merely the latest in several years of repulsive and insulting remarks. In addition, the possibility of replacing Kimmel with a program welcoming to all audiences and attractive to local advertisers was likely appealing to Nexstar and Sinclair execs.
Disagreements between networks and affiliates is not a new phenomenon. Over the years, I attended several affiliate meetings with ABC, CBS and Fox networks in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New Orleans. Network executives, affiliate station representatives, and television celebrities would convene annually to discuss matters of common interest. Occasionally, the meetings could become testy. Most often the verbal tussles occurred over programming decisions because the affiliates were stuck with whatever the network chose to broadcast.
The problems of Colbert and Kimmel did not affect just their shows. Local advertisers were becoming skittish at having their commercials carried in adjacent programming such as the 11pm newscast, which led into the late night programs. This is especially troublesome because a TV station’s local newscasts are a station’s most valuable franchises. Newscasts are among the biggest revenue sources. Colbert and Kimmel had become a contagious virus.
Kimmel was an albatross around the necks of the ABC network and ABC affiliates. If ABC was seeking a pretext to dump him, then Kimmel delivered it to them with his insulting and moronic comments about Charlie Kirk. This wasn’t a gray area. Kimmel had to go out of his way to craft the demonstrative lie he told. It was intended to hurt. It was evil. Kimmel’s seemingly clueless behavior demonstrated a total lack of self-awareness at just how vulnerable he was. The urge to be a mean-spirited jerk was too powerful for him to ignore.
I did not mention David Letterman in the previous paragraphs because he straddled the line between the group of great hosts and the garbage hosts. Letterman morphed from being a funny comedian in the beginning to becoming another angry activist in his later years. His repulsive joke about underage sex with Sarah Palin’s 14-year old daughter shortly after Obama became president immediately comes to mind.
What does the future hold for Jimmy Fallon? I would not be surprised if NBC keeps him in place for the time being. He is not nearly as political as Colbert and Kimmel, and therefore less offensive to millions of viewers. It’s possible he could inherit many of the orphaned Colbert and Kimmel viewers and keep the Tonight Show operating in the black. And no, none of the Colbert and Kimmel viewers will migrate to Gutfeld! on Fox News Channel. No viewers who are fans of Colbert and Kimmel would tune-in to Greg Gutfeld.
Mark Hyman is a 35-year military veteran and a retired television investigative journalist. He spends most days at home annoying his wife and sending silly memes to his children. Follow him on Twitter (X) at @markhyman.
Mark welcomes all news tips and story ideas in the strictest of confidence. You can message him on Substack.
Johnny Carson said it best. Longer clips are out there, but this is the shortest one I could find directly to the point.
https://youtube.com/shorts/UQUwG9-uVoE