On Wednesday, Disney caved to pressure from various partners and benched Jimmy Kimmel Live! Ultimately, the decision was Bob Iger’s and Dana Walden’s — but there was more leading up to it than previously reported.
On Monday’s episode of his long-running ABC late night talk show, Jimmy Kimmel mocked MAGA Republicans for scrambling to distance their own ideologies from those of Charlie Kirk’s alleged murderer, Tyler Robinson. In the days following Kirk’s murder, the left and the right were quick to point fingers at each other over Robinson’s perceived political leanings.
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“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said during the monologue.
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The joke kicked off a “social-media shitstorm,” a source with information tells The Hollywood Reporter. It died down — temporarily.
But almost immediately after FCC chair Brendan Carr’s appearance on Benny Johnson’s podcast, the storm of shit “became a bigger swirl.”
Within hours, multiple ABC station owners held calls with senior Disney leadership expressing their concern with the comments, a second source tells THR.
Inside of ABC, “multiple conversations” with Kimmel were had at the “executive level,” the first person says, though the talks had not yet reached Bob Iger or TV head Dana Walden. The execs wanted to know: How was Kimmel going to address the situation on Wednesday night’s show?
The answer was not satisfactory to management, sources say. Meanwhile, the advertiser calls began to roll in and then the big affiliate conglomerates, Nexstar and Sinclair, threatened to preempt the show. The second source says that the blowback was snowballing enough that had ABC not acted, Kimmel’s show would have been dark in a large swath of the country, even beyond the Sinclair and Nexstar territories (including in the Washington, D.C., metro area).
The situation became a safety issue as Disney employees saw their emails doxxed, per the first source — some even received death threats. Disney wanted Kimmel to address the situation in a way that “would take down the temperature,” but what he had planned was “going to fan the flames with the MAGA fan base,” the source says.
A source at Jimmy Kimmel Live! counters to THR that Kimmel’s planned on-air address was not “making it worse,” but that he simply “wasn’t kowtowing” to the outrage.
Kimmel was “defending what he said [as] being grossly mischaracterized by a certain group of people,” the show source says.
THR reported on Wednesday that Kimmel did not plan to apologize for his comments, but did plan to address the situation on-air.
Talks between Kimmel and Disney/ABC hit enough of a stalemate that executives there decided Wednesday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! had run out of time to be salvaged. The show’s live-to-tape time was not far off — the studio audience was lined up outside but had not yet been brought in. (Jimmy Kimmel Live! tapes live at 4 p.m. PT.)
By this point, 66 of the roughly 200 affiliate stations had said they would not carry the episode — that’s when ABC announced it was suspending the program — a Bob Iger and Dana Walden joint decision that was a “last resort,” the first person says. Walden delivered the news to Kimmel but did not ask him to apologize, says the source, who described Wednesday as “a very heavy, very hard day” inside the walls of Disney and ABC.
Disney and Kimmel declined to comment on the situation.
Disney is still trying to find a path back to Jimmy Kimmel Live!, according to the source. At the top, executives are hopeful, but note that the future is up to Kimmel’s willingness to participate in the cooling-off process.
Of course, the future of Jimmy Kimmel Live! is also at least sort of up to the ABC affiliates. The source could not say how many affiliates would have to be on board for ABC to continue business with Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Alex Weprin contributed to this report.
