Jimmy Kimmel’s Show to Return to ABC on Tuesday Night
The network’s removal of Mr. Kimmel’s show last week almost immediately morphed into a flashpoint for free speech in America.
Jimmy Kimmel is coming back.
ABC said on Monday that “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” would return to its airwaves on Tuesday, ending an impasse that began last week.
“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,” the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, said in a statement.
“It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive,” the statement said. “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.”
The network had removed Mr. Kimmel “indefinitely” last weekafter a top Trump regulator and many conservatives said he inaccurately described the politics of the man accused of fatally shooting the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
The subsequent suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” almost immediately morphed into a flashpoint for free speech in America.
ABC pulled the show just hours after Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said on a podcast that Mr. Kimmel’s remarks were part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people,” and that the agency was “going to have remedies that we can look at.”
“Frankly, when you see stuff like this — I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Mr. Carr told the podcast’s host, Benny Johnson.
Mr. Kimmel had planned to address the growing firestorm during his opening monologue for the Wednesday episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” But after senior Disney executives — including its chief executive, Robert A. Iger, and its head of television, Dana Walden — reviewed Mr. Kimmel’s planned remarks, they worried his monologue would make the situation worse, and decided to bench him and his show instead.
Disney did not publicly explain its decision at the time, and Mr. Kimmel has not commented publicly on the show’s suspension.
Conversations between Disney and Mr. Kimmel to return his show to the air formally began on Thursday, according to two people briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. Mr. Iger, Ms. Walden and Rob Mills, the ABC executive who directly oversees the show, met with Mr. Kimmel at the office of his lawyer, Andy Galker, in the Century City neighborhood of Los Angeles. Mr. Kimmel’s manager, James Dixon, participated in the meeting via a video call.
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The session ended without Mr. Kimmel’s agreeing to changes in the monologue he had planned to deliver on Wednesday, which had sought to clarify his earlier commentary but also punched back against figures on the right who he believed had misrepresented those comments.
Mr. Iger and Ms. Walden continued to communicate with Mr. Kimmel throughout the weekend, the two people said. An agreement about when to bring the show back, and what Mr. Kimmel would say upon his return, was made on Monday morning.
A representative for Mr. Kimmel did not return requests for comment.
It is still unclear whether Nexstar and Sinclair — two major television operators that own many ABC affiliates and have vowed to pre-empt “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in the aftermath of his comments — will air future episodes of the show.
Representatives for Nexstar and Sinclair did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The imbroglio began last Monday when Mr. Kimmel used his opening monologue to say “the MAGA gang” was “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.”
Conservatives pounced, saying the comments mischaracterized the political beliefs of Tyler Robinson, the accused shooter. Prosecutors have said that Mr. Robinson objected to Mr. Kirk’s “hatred,” but the authorities have not said which of Mr. Kirk’s views Mr. Robinson had found hateful. Mr. Robinson’s mother said that her son had recently shifted toward the political left and become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.”
In the days since ABC’s decision, at least five Hollywood unions, collectively representing more than 400,000 workers, publicly condemned the company.
The screenwriters’ union decried what they called “corporate cowardice,” and organized a protest last week outside the main gate at Disney headquarters in Burbank, Calif. Damon Lindelof, a creator of ABC’s “Lost,” said that if Mr. Kimmel’s program did not return from suspension, he couldn’t “in good conscience work for the company that imposed it.” Michael Eisner, a former chief executive of Disney, issued a rare rebuke on social media on Friday, as well. Some conservatives expressed misgivings, too. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, likened Mr. Carr’s comments to a mob boss, arguing that his comments to potentially retaliate against media companies were “dangerous as hell.”
“I like Brendan Carr, but we should not be in this business,” Mr. Cruz said on his podcast last week. “We should denounce it.”
Mr. Carr, for his part, used an appearance in Manhattan before Disney’s announcement on Monday to try to minimize his own role in the events that led to Mr. Kimmel’s suspension.
He said that Disney had merely made a “business decision” in response to feedback from viewers and affiliates, and he argued that Democrats’ claims of undue government pressure were “a campaign of projection and distortion.”
“Jimmy Kimmel is in the situation that he’s in because of his ratings, not because of anything that’s happened at the federal government level,” Mr. Carr said.
John Koblin covers the television industry for The Times.
Brooks Barnes covers all things Hollywood. He joined The Times in 2007 and previously worked at The Wall Street Journal.
Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016.
Benjamin Mullin reports for The Times on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact him securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or at benjamin.mullin@nytimes.com.
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1 comment:
I was fixing to say. Probably a lot of people got pissed about that.
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