Jimmy Kimmel is back, per Disney, which lost $3.4 billion in market cap and 3.4 percent of its stock value after capitulating to the Trump administration on the comedian’s ABC late-night talk show.
“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday,” Disney said in a PR statement to USA Today.
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The effort to split hairs – “the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive,” seriously? – may not go over well with the tens of thousands who have canceled their Disney+, Hulu and ESPN subscriptions in the wake of the generated controversy.
The issue that precipitated Disney’s dumb self-own wasn’t what Kimmel had to say on his show a week ago about the murder of MAGA provocateur Charlie Kirk – because the comment from Kimmel that got the Trump administration into a lather wasn’t about the murder of Charlie Kirk, but rather, the efforts of the Trump/MAGA cult to pin the murder on far-left groups, to score points in our never-ending political and culture war.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, doing what dishonest people do, twisted Kimmel’s words to issue a not-at-all-veiled threat to ABC, claiming, incorrectly, in a Wednesday interview with Kremlin-financed MAGA podcaster Benny Johnson that the FCC could take away the network’s broadcast license.
No, in case you were wondering, the FCC doesn’t actually have that power.
Carr’s threat to do something that he cannot, in fact, do, prompted action by a pair of media companies, Nexstar and Sinclair, who announced in the hours after Carr’s comments that they would pre-empt Kimmel’s show on the local ABC affiliates in their portfolios.
Disney then followed up with its own announcement that Kimmel’s show would be taken off the air “indefinitely.”
Among those doing a victory lap in the wake of that news was none other than Donald Trump, who said, again, incorrectly, that Kimmel had been “fired” – um, no, sorry, POTUS, Kimmel wasn’t “fired” – “because he had bad ratings more than anything else.”
“They should have fired him a long time ago, so you know, you can call that free speech or not. He was fired for lack of talent,” said Trump, who knows about being “fired” from a network TV show for “bad ratings” – NBC axed Trump from “The Apprentice” in 2015, after years of flagging ratings; the show lost more than 80 percent of its audience from its debut in 2004, and even the gimmicked “Celebrity Apprentice” failed to get traction with viewers.
Kimmel’s show ranked second in the 11:35 p.m. ET weeknight timeslot in the second quarter of 2025, per LateNighter, averaging 1.77 million viewers, trailing Stephen Colbert on CBS (2.42 million), and beating Jimmy Fallon on NBC (1.19 million).
To borrow from George Costanza: right in that meaty part of the curve, not showing off, not falling behind.
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Chris Graham
