Jimmy Kimmel’s Reprieve

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, December 09, 2025

 

When CBS revealed that it would cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert at the end of its 2025–26 season, many speculated that the network had made a sacrificial offering to the Trump White House. It soon became clear, though, that the surprise shakeup was strictly business.

 

“This isn’t about Colbert, or Fallon, or Kimmel,” said one industry analyst of the changing commercial landscape in late-night TV. “The platform economics have changed across the board. It’s like trying to sell newspapers in 2009.” It was reasonable to expect, therefore, that more shoes would drop soon enough, and they did.

 

The suspension of ABC host Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves in September was ostensibly inspired not just by the controversy the host courted when, long after he should have cleared up his confusion, he insisted that Charlie Kirk was murdered by a fellow right-winger. The same economic inducements that cost Colbert his job were at work, rendering Jimmy Kimmel Live! an unprofitable venture. Indeed, some even speculated that Nexstar, which owns many local ABC affiliates, sought to grease the skids inside the administration for a proposed takeover of its rival, Tegna, and compelling ABC to ditch Kimmel amounted to an economic prophylactic.

 

Given that administration officials seemed inclined to police the content broadcast by the entertainment companies that it doesn’t like, that theory could not be summarily dismissed.

 

But then, perhaps in response to the administration’s triumphalism and certainly in deference to the outcry of Kimmel fans who thought his firing represented a sop to Trump officials, ABC reinstated the late-night host. This week, Kimmel signed a one-year extension of his contract with the broadcast network.

 

A vulgar Marxian interpretation of these events would be a confounding read. If the pernicious influence of capital dictates circumstances, why would ABC subordinate the program’s long-term prospects to the immediate demands of Kimmel’s small but angry audience? Surely, enduring the embittered recriminations of a handful of dead-enders would be a small price to pay when compared with spending another year throwing great gobs of good money after bad? Even if the advertisers who backed Kimmel bolted, never to return, the network would still be trading short-term pain for long-term gain.

 

But money isn’t everything, and the network had not “withered under government pressure,” as good-governance groups alleged. Indeed, catering to a crowd that insists on anti-Trump content at all times may not be a lucrative enterprise, but there are other, less tangible rewards associated with striking a defiant posture toward this administration.

 

In the end, though, Trump may get the last laugh. The economics of late night aren’t going to make more sense in the spring of 2027 than they do today, and Kimmel’s already stale shtick is unlikely to experience a renaissance in the interim. With their ham-fisted hectoring of the network, Trump’s subordinates may have bought Kimmel a reprieve. But the bill will come due, and it will be worse for ABC than if they’d just pulled the Band-Aid off this year.

 

Still, ABC’s behavior is valuable insofar as it exposes the limits of the president’s reach and the reality that money only gets you so far.