Three months ago, ABC and Disney pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air for a week, after their late-night host's defamatory rant about the nature of Charlie Kirk's assassination. Their two largest affiliate groups refused to air the show when ABC brought him back, but finally knuckled under when Disney started playing hardball over their affiliate contracts. The controversy allowed Disney to pose as a First Amendment stalwart, but any ratings boost faded as quickly as one might imagine.
Throughout the tempest, Kimmel's contractual status remained an important part of the context. The late-night genre is dying, and Kimmel's show was reportedly costing Disney and ABC roughly a similar amount of money as Stephen Colbert costs CBS and Paramount. The question left hanging from the scandal was whether Disney would cut its losses in March, when Kimmel's contract expired.
Yesterday, we got an answer to that question – if one parses between the lines. Disney extended the contract with Kimmel, but only for another 14 months:
On Monday, Dec. 8, Jimmy Kimmel signed a contract extension for his late-night show, securing its spot on the air through 2027, PEOPLE has learned. His current contract was slated to end in May 2026, but the deal he just signed takes him and the show through next year's season, Bloomberg first reported. ...
Kimmel's contract extension also comes nearly three months after Disney's ABC decided to pull the series from the air "indefinitely" on Sept. 17 following Kimmel's comments on Charlie Kirk's death. At the time, the network confirmed to PEOPLE that Kimmel’s "comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views, or values of the local communities in which we are located."
"Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time, and we have made the difficult decision to preempt his show in an effort to let cooler heads prevail as we move toward the resumption of respectful, constructive dialogue."
A whole, whopping fourteen months, eh? With a contract that now ends in May, just before the summer doldrums? That's not a vote of confidence. It's a can-kicking exercise that allows Disney to distance itself from Kimmel's stink over his remarks about Charlie Kirk, while preparing for the inevitable. Or, at the very least, it represents a last-ditch opportunity for Kimmel to prove he can restore ABC's late-night program to profitability and relevance.
That conclusion becomes even more obvious when looking at the length of the extension. If Kimmel held real value for Disney, they would have offered Kimmel a multi-season extension. People notes in this report that Kimmel got a three-year extension in his current contract in 2024, at which point Kimmel thought it might be his last. That's the usual scope for extensions when it comes to valuable on-air talent. A 14-month extention is the equivalent to a corporate performance improvement plan, at best.
The ratings alone explain why. Two months ago, ratings for Jimmy Kimmel Live! crashed and burned after the brief flicker of interest in the fight over his suspension:
The liberal comedian, who roared back to ABC's airwaves on September 23 after being briefly suspended for inflammatory remarks about the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, has seen his viewership collapse by a staggering 71 percent.
The plunge in numbers puts his program's future on shakier ground than ever before.
On Thursday, October 2, Jimmy Kimmel Live! averaged just 1.9 million total viewers, down from the 6.5 million who tuned in for his hotly anticipated comeback.
Among the coveted 25-54 demographic, the hemorrhage was even worse with Kimmel drawing only 265,000 viewers, an 85% nosedive from the 1.7 million he had scored just days earlier.
That figure marked his smallest demo audience since the suspension and signals a brutal comedown for a host who had hoped the furore surrounding his suspension would translate into ratings gold.
Since then, there hasn't been much news about Kimmel's ratings. And if they had sharply improved, the Protection Racket Media that circled the wagons around Kimmel would have flooded the zone with that news.
Christian Toto sees the writing on the wall, too:
And, in the wake of his one-week suspension for lying about Charlie Kirk’s alleged murderer, ABC would have taken a massive PR hit had it cut ties with Kimmel now.
Most consumers wouldn’t care one way or the other. The Hollywood community, which recoiled at Kimmel’s one-week suspension, would have threatened to retaliate against the Mouse House if it severed ties with Kimmel now.
The outraged T-shirts and protest placards would write themselves:
President Donald Trump made them do it!
Now, ABC can delay the inevitable for 12+ months. If Colbert was costing CBS a reported $40 million a year, there’s little chance Kimmel, who generally draws a smaller crowd than Colbert, is making sizable money for ABC.
This 14-month extension with its late-spring expiration date in 2027 is an exit sign, not a vote of confidence. ABC and Disney are subsidizing an irrelevancy for another 18 months just to avoid the backlash from the progressive elite and Antifa activists that make up Kimmel's audience. Kimmel had better enjoy this valedictory lap, or at least the cash he's costing Disney shareholders. Let's see whether the affiliates will stick around that long, or will quietly start looking for more profitable content in their late-night schedules.
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