As the entertainment community rallies behind Jimmy Kimmel in the wake of ABC’s sudden yanking of his late-night show at the behest of Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, pressing questions remain about his immediate future on the network. Namely, whether the show’s upcoming residency at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, scheduled to air from Sept. 29 through Oct. 3, will go on.
Sources close to the production tell Rolling Stone that trucks containing the show’s staging are due to leave Los Angeles today, Sept. 19, in order to make the cross-country trek to New York. To relocate the show for five days is a costly move: north of $5 million, estimates an industry insider. Video showing members of Kimmel’s Hollywood crew packing up gear surfaced on social media yesterday, adding to the confusion — and speculation (was Margo Price Kimmel’s last-ever guest?) — about whether the show will ever return to air. (Representatives for ABC and Kimmel did not respond to requests for comment.)
Kimmel’s future at ABC was thrown into doubt on Wednesday, when the network abruptly pulled the show following conservative outcry over a joke the host made during a recent monologue about the suspect accused of killing Charlie Kirk. During an interview with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson, Carr said “licensed broadcasters” should push back against ABC’s parent company Disney and “preempt” Kimmel.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr continued. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Not long after, Nexstar and Sinclair — two media conglomerates which own ABC affiliates around the country — announced that they would preempt Kimmel. (As has been widely noted, Nexstar is seeking to pull off a $6.2 billion merger with Tegna, which will require the FCC’s approval.) ABC made its decision to pull the show soon after.
The Brooklyn bow holds special significance for Kimmel, who was born in the borough and spent his early childhood years there. Indeed, Kimmel has staged runs at BAM on seven different occasions, dating all the way back to 2012, and he has a full slate of guests already booked for this year’s run (including fellow embattled late-night vet Stephen Colbert).
“New York is Jimmy’s hometown and Brooklyn has always been a high-energy crowd” for the show, says a source, who also characterizes ABC’s decision as particularly shocking given that Kimmel and Disney chief Bob Iger are “very tight.”
The timeline of events suggests there were several opportunities for the network to flag any comments in the monologue deemed offensive. Kimmel is intimately involved in every aspect of the show’s production, from ideation to delivery, the source says, but there are protocols in place during which any number of people could have requested an edit or removal. The broadcast standards department could, and often does, step in during the writing phase and can request that the team axe a joke entirely. And since the show is not live (despite its title), and tapes at 4 p.m. Pacific Time, there is ample time to tweak and edit before it airs three hours later.
“It goes through a lot of hands,” says the insider, who adds that such cuts are routinely made “at every [late-night] show.”
One possible explanation for how the remark evaded further scrutiny is that it was in actuality fairly innocuous. Kimmel’s exact words were: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
Fox News took those comments to mean that Kimmel had suggested the “Kirk shooter was part of [the] ‘MAGA gang.’” Carr, for his part, didn’t just jump on the bandwagon; the FCC chief was its grand marshal.
But also muddling standard operating procedures is the fact that, according to the insider, ABC doesn’t have a dedicated late-night executive. Instead, Kimmel rolls up to the network’s EVP for Unscripted and Alternative Entertainment, who oversees many shows. “It’s such a disservice,” says the insider.
As Rolling Stone previously reported, in the hours leading up to the decision to pull Kimmel, two sources familiar with the matter say, senior executives at ABC, its owner Disney, and affiliates convened emergency meetings to figure out how to minimize the damage. Multiple executives felt that Kimmel had not actually said anything over the line, the two sources said, but the threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed.
“They were pissing themselves all day,” one ABC insider told Rolling Stone.
As has been reported elsewhere, along with the threats from affiliate owners, Disney was also fielding calls from concerned advertisers. Disney employees even reported being doxxed or receiving death threats, according to The Hollywood Reporter. When ABC learned that about 66 out of approximately 200 affiliates were prepared not to air Kimmel on Wednesday, Iger and Disney’s head of TV, Dana Walden, made the decision to pull the show. Walden reportedly delivered the news to Kimmel personally.
When the call was made to pull Kimmel on Wednesday, existing protocol dictated that ABC should’ve aired a pre-approved episode of the show to rerun. To which one staffer allegedly joked, “Why don’t we just run last night’s show?”
But word purportedly came down from master control that Celebrity Family Feud would air in its place. “It wasn’t discussed with anyone,” claims the source.
On Thursday, Kimmel and his representatives reportedly met with Disney executives, including Walden, to discuss the controversy, but no solution was reached. According to Puck, Kimmel has stuck to his desire to issue a statement that would clarify he never believed Kirk’s alleged killer was MAGA, but reportedly would also take aim at Fox News and other conservatives he believed dishonestly distorted his original comments.
Sources at Disney have told outlets like Puck and THR that Kimmel’s proposal was “not helping the situation” and would “fan the flames with the MAGA fan base.” A Kimmel source countered to THR that he wasn’t “making it worse,” but insisting he “wasn’t kowtowing” to the uproar.
The decisions by Nexstar and ABC to silence Kimmel over relatively innocuous comments is the latest sign of how fearful major corporations and media companies have grown of the second Trump administration. The president and his lieutenants have made clear that they’re willing to leverage the full weight of the federal government against networks and their parent companies, especially if TV personalities or comedians on the network say things that annoy Trump.
Even before Trump won the 2024 election, he and some of his closest advisers had plotted how to use the FCC and other powerful federal organs to punish late-night comics whom Trump has hated for years.
It’s also not the first time Kimmel has found himself at odds with Iger and Disney brass. Back in 2013, Kimmel faced corporate fire for a bit that aired on his show in which he asked a bunch of first-graders for suggestions on how the U.S. should deal with the massive debt the U.S. owed China. One boy replied, “Kill everyone in China,” to which Kimmel deadpanned, “OK, that’s an interesting idea.”
At the time, Disney was keen on making further inroads into China. It had already tweaked aspects of its films, such as Iron Man 3, to ensure their distribution there, and the company was also aiming to open a $4.4 billion Disneyland Shanghai theme park.
ABC wound up issuing an apology, while Kimmel also addressed the controversy on air, saying, “I thought it was obvious that I didn’t agree with that statement, but apparently it wasn’t. So I just wanted to say, I’m sorry, I apologize.”
As for the current crisis, the insider offers that Disney “could have avoided this whole mess by moving Kimmel to Hulu. The future of late-night may be on streaming, where you can watch whenever you want and skip past what you don’t. It’s how people consume these shows, anyway.”
