Before CBS decided to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel was pessimistic about the future of the late night comedy show. Now that Colbert has been cancelled, Kimmel is singing a different tune in order to advance the narrative that Colbert’s cancellation had something to do with President Trump and that, actually, the state of late night is quite strong.
In a recent Variety, Clayton Davis invited Kimmel to discuss how, “You’ve shown great camaraderie with the other late-night hosts, especially during the Colbert situation. Talk about those friendships.”
Kimmel answered:
I think we were all shocked and disappointed that this kind of thing is happening in America, and also disappointed that we don’t see more people on the right stepping up and saying, ‘Hey, this is no good.’ Silencing comedians, commentators, whatever you want to call people… I have to say, if Joe Biden had used his muscle to get Sean Hannity kicked off the air, you may be surprised to learn that I would not support that. I would, in fact, support Sean Hannity in that situation, because I thought one of the founding principles of this country was free speech. But people don’t seem to care about protecting it unless you agree with them.
Clayton also asked, “There have been reports that Colbert’s show was losing $40 million a year. What’s your take on that?”
Kimmel was unconvinced, “I just want to say that the idea that Stephen Colbert show was losing $40 million a year is beyond nonsensical. These alleged insiders who supposedly analyze the budgets of the shows — I don’t know who they are, but I do know they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
After some talk about affiliate fees, Kimmel continued, “There’s just not a snowball’s chance in hell that that’s anywhere near accurate. Even that — that’s all you need to know. Suddenly he’s losing $40 million a year? I will tell you, the first 10 years I did the show, they claimed we weren’t making any money — and we had five times as many viewers on ABC as we do now. Who knows what’s true? All I know is they keep paying us — and that’s kind of all you need to know.”
Clayton then wondered, “What about the narrative that late-night television is dead?”
Kimmel admitted that “network television is declining,” but added:
More people are watching late-night television than ever before — and I include Johnny Carson in that. People may find that shocking. When Carson was at his peak, he was getting around 9 million viewers a night. That’s huge. Of course, the lead-in shows were getting 30 and 40 million, which was a big part of it. But people are still watching late-night — just in different places. Our monologues get between 2 and 5 million views, sometimes more, every night. Seth Meyers gets 2 million on YouTube alone. We’re not even talking about Instagram or the other platforms. ‘The Daily Show’ — Jon Stewart on a Monday night will get 5 million views. Then you add in the TV ratings. So the idea that late-night is dead is simply untrue.
The problem for Kimmel is that the money that a network will make from a YouTube ad is not comparable with the money it will make from a standard TV commercial.
It wasn’t that long ago when Kimmel claimed to understand this. Just last year, he told the Politickin podcast, “Maybe there’ll be one but there won’t be a lot of them. There’s a lot to watch and now people can watch anything at anytime, they’ve got all these streaming services. It used to be Johnny Carson was the only thing on at 11:30 p.m. and so everybody watched and then David Letterman was on after Johnny so people watched those two shows, but now they’re so many options.”
During that same interview, Kimmel seemed to suggest that YouTube won’t save the format, “Maybe more significantly, the fact that people are easily able to watch your monologue online the next day, it really cancels out the need to watch it when it’s on the air. Once people stop watching it when it’s on the air, networks are going to stop paying for it to be made.”
The only two things that have changed from 2024 to 2025 are that Donald Trump became president again and CBS cancelled Colbert. To preserve the political narrative that Colbert is a political martyr, Kimmel has done a 180 on his views of late night’s financial viability. Perhaps it is no wonder Kimmel thinks Trump Derangement Syndrome is actually a good thing.
