Jimmy Kimmel got candid about his show’s recent suspension during an appearance on fellow late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show.
The two comedians appeared on each other’s programs on Tuesday, September 30, and spilled the beans on their recent issues with their respective networks.
Kimmel, 57, returned to the air last week after being temporarily suspended by ABC following right-wing criticism over his comments about the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s killing. Meanwhile, Colbert’s show was canceled by CBS in July.
On Tuesday’s episode of The Late Show, Kimmel admitted that he thought Jimmy Kimmel Live! was “over” for good when ABC decided to pull it off the air on September 17. (The show returned after a six-day hiatus on September 22.)
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“I was in my office, typing away. I get a phone call. It’s ABC. They say they want to talk to me. This is unusual,” Kimmel explained how he learned the news. “As far as I knew, they didn’t even know I was doing a show previous to this,” he wisecracked.
“I have five people who work in my office with me, so the only private place to go is the bathroom. So, I go into the bathroom, and I’m on the phone with the ABC executives, and they say, ‘Listen, we want to take the temperature down. We’re concerned about what you’re going to say tonight, and we decided the best route is to take the show off the air,’” he said.
Kimmel continued, “I said, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ and they said, ‘Well, we think it’s a good idea.’ And then there was a vote and I lost the vote.”
The comedian returned to his office to break the news to his staff and joked that his wife, Molly McNearney, an executive producer and writer on the show, “said I was whiter than Jim Gaffigan when I came out of there.”
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Colbert, 61, asked Kimmel how he felt at that moment, prompting Kimmel to candidly reveal, “I thought, ‘That’s it. It’s over. It is over.’ I was like, ‘This is never coming back on the air.’ That’s really what I thought.”
Kimmel shared that the studio audience was already in place to tape that evening’s show, and they had to be sent home.
“We had a chef, Christian Petroni, who was making meatballs and polenta that night. He’d been cooking all day,” Kimmel said. “[Singer] Howard Jones was taping a performance to air in the future. The song he [performed] — because we decided to tape it anyway, even though we sent the audience home — in front of our disappointed employees was ‘Things Can Only Get Better.’”
Over on Tuesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC, Kimmel quizzed Colbert about his show’s cancellation. Colbert revealed that he found out from his and Kimmel’s mutual manager, James “Baby Doll” Dixon, who kept the news from him for around a week while Colbert was on vacation because “he didn’t wanna ruin my vacation.”
