Jimmy Kimmel’s return to late-night television after a brief suspension drew 6.26 million total viewers, according to preliminary Nielsen ratings, making it the show’s highest-performing regularly scheduled episode in over a decade.
The robust ratings are remarkable partly because a typical episode of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” attracts roughly 1.6 million viewers.
Disney, which owns ABC, highlighted that the latest episode did not air in 23% of American households. That’s because Nexstar and Sinclair, two major owners of ABC broadcast affiliates, continue to refuse to run the show following Kimmel’s remarks about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
I watched it on YouTube. Never watched Kimmel before. I wasn’t missing anything. Not that I dislike him or anything he was saying. He said all the right things to an audience that probably needed to hear it and wasn’t hearing it elsewhere. It all just struck me as very milquetoast, lowest common denominator entertainment/sermonizing. Half the comments on Lemmy hit harder. Seems like a relic of a pre-internet time to me (a terminally online weirdo).
He had The Man Show, which was successful as hell, but back then building your own late night show empire was the first step to being handed the reigns to the Tonight Show, so in the context of his career, he’d have been crazy for him to turn down heading up the next best thing, following trying to fill Letterman’s and Colbert’s shoes. That said, I wouldn’t want to live in the shadow of comedians who had to deal with the exact same thing 100 years ago either, I’m not Charlie Chaplin.
100% agree. I only watched it out of morbid curiosity to see how he’d handle it, and it was disappointingly diplomatic, and the crocodile tears made me throw up in my mouth a little, but it was probably as much as a corporate drone like him could get away with.
I will be returning to not watching him again moving forward.