At one point, Jimmy Kimmel was done with hosting his ABC late-night talk show and hoped the network would cancel it.
“I didn’t know what I was doing, and I would pray that they canceled the show sometimes,” the comedian, 57, revealed on the Wednesday, October 22, edition of Ted Danson’s “Everybody Knows Your Name” podcast.
Kimmel has hosted Jimmy Kimmel Live! since 2003. Addressing his earliest days in front of the camera, he added, “I didn’t want to quit because I didn’t want to disappoint all the many people who worked for me, but I couldn’t. I was just — I couldn’t do it anymore.”
For starters, “We didn’t have guests many times. We’d go on the air live at midnight, at 12:05,” he recalled, adding, “There were times it was 5:30 in the afternoon and we didn’t have guests for that night’s show, and I would have to just pick up the phone and call my friends.”
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The pressure affected Kimmel, who said, “That’s not how you go into a show. You can’t operate that way.”
To help, he reached out to a group of friends that included ex Sarah Silverman, Kathy Griffin, David Alan Grier, Adam Carolla and Anthony Anderson.
“God bless them, because I needed them,” Kimmel told Danson, 77. “And they were always ready at a moment’s notice to come on.”
Following a rocky start, the show “stabilized and we figured out how to do it,” Kimmel said.
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He spiced up the format by introducing “running bits,” among other features to attract viewers and “keep [him] afloat.”
Kimmel’s remarks come one month after he was temporarily suspended following a monologue he did on the show about the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s murder.
While appearing as a guest on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in early October, Kimmel admitted that he thought Jimmy Kimmel Live! was “over” for good when ABC decided to pull it off the air on September 17, sparking protests from his supporters. (The show returned after a six-day hiatus on September 22.)
“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 recalled of how he learned of his suspension. “As far as I knew, they didn’t even know I was doing a show previous to this.”
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He continued at the time, “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.’”
Kimmel pushed back.
“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,” he said.
He then returned to this office to break the news to his staff, joking that his wife, Molly McNearney, an executive producer on the show, “said I was whiter than Jim Gaffigan when I came out of there.”
