Howard Jones, the ’80s British pop star, was preparing to tape a performance of “Things Can Only Get Better,” and celebrity chef Cristiano Petroni had been cooking up meatballs and polenta all day when Jimmy Kimmel found out that he was set to be taken off of ABC two weeks ago.
It’s just after 3pm on September 17 and Kimmel gets a phone call from ABC executives. “They say they want to talk to me. This is unusual. They didn’t even know I was doing a show previous to this,” he joked on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “I have like five people working in my office with me, so the only private place to go is the bathroom. The ABC executives say, ‘Listen, we want to take the temperature down. We’re concerned about what you’re going to say tonight, and we decided that the best route is to take the show off the air’. I said, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea’. Then there was a vote, and I lost the vote, so I put my pants back on, I walked out to my office, and I called in some of the executive producers and I said, ‘They’re pulling the show off the air.’”
Kimmel’s wife Molly McNearney, who is an executive producer on the show, said the comedian was “whiter than Jim Gaffigan” when he found out.
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He admitted that he thought this was the end. “’I’m never coming back on the air.’ That’s really what I thought,” he said.
Kimmel said that as he was heading home that evening, he was followed by 20 paparazzi cars as well as two helicopters. When he arrived home, his 11-year-old daughter told her father that she could sell her Labubus, while his son “got naked and started running around the house”.
Both Kimmel and Colbert heard from unexpected people when they became headline news. Colbert revealed that he heard from a high school girlfriend, Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin and James Taylor when his show was axed. Kimmel revealed that Taylor also sent him a text. “I want to see if JT did a cut and paste on us,” he joked.
Kimmel’s suspension was another watershed moment for late-night television, which two months earlier, had been hit by the fact that CBS was axing The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Tonight, was another major moment for late-night. Kimmel was appearing on The Late Show on the same night as Colbert was appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which decamped to Brooklyn for its traditional run of shows.
Deadline understands that Colbert taped JKL! before Kimmel joined him at the Ed Sullivan Theater, a move that has never happened before in late-night. The closest recent stunt is when Kimmel hosted The Tonight Show and Jimmy Fallon hosted JKL! on April Fool’s Day in 2022.
Kimmel has regularly taken his show to Brooklyn over the years; in fact, it’s not the first time that Colbert has appeared on the show in New York. The Colbert Report star appeared alongside Daily Show host Jon Stewart in 2012.
On The Late Show, Kimmel said to Colbert, “We have to stick together,” and called the experience an “emotional rollercoaster”.
The pair agreed that they both find themselves appreciating being on late-night more after their recent experiences. Kimmel joked that Colbert’s staff was asking if he was hiring. “I’ll be Guillermo’s side kick,” added Colbert.
Colbert asked Kimmel that when he was a radio DJ, did he ever think that the President would be “celebrating your unemployment?”
“That son of a bitch… I never even imagined there would ever be a situation in which the President of our country was celebrating hundreds of Americans losing their jobs, somebody who took pleasure in that. That, to me, is the absolute opposite of what a leader of this country is supposed to be,” he replied.
Towards the end of The Late Show interview, Kimmel asked Colbert, “When are you going to go nuts?” He didn’t answer, but Kimmel brought gifts including a Statue of Liberty bong and his sidekick Guillermo Rodriguez turned up with tequila shots. Told he only had a minute left, Colbert joked, “What are they going to do? Cancel me?”
Then, he raised a toast, “To good friends, great jobs and late-night TV.”
Over on JKL!, Kimmel joked that “it’s the show the FCC doesn’t want you to see” and he and Colbert “thought it might be a fun way to drive the President nuts”.
Colbert revealed that he was on stage shooting The Late Show when he received a text that Kimmel had been “pulled indefinitely by ABC”. Colbert brought a clip, where he says “Wow” a couple of times and then takes a break to figure out what went on. “There’s no signal in the Ed Sullivan Theater, so there was no rationale,” he said. “I generally assume it was your fault.”
Colbert then told the story about his own cancellation. He said his wife jokingly asked, “What happened, did you get canceled?” not knowing that he had just found out his show had been axed by CBS.
He said that his wife convinced him to tell his staff the next day. He admitted that it took several takes to record his announcement message because he was so nervous.
Kimmel was also joined in Brooklyn by Seth Meyers (and his brother Josh, who plays Gavin Newsom on JKL!). “What happened with your show?,” he asked. “We’re back on the air,” Kimmel replied. “I was rooting for you, that’s really good to hear.”
