After Jimmy Kimmel Live! was briefly taken off the air, Jimmy Kimmel revealed he feared his late-night show might be finished.
In September 2025, Jimmy Kimmel Live! was taken off ABC for almost a week after Kimmel delivered a monologue that some viewers found offensive.
The suspension followed comments by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr on a podcast, which prompted Disney to remove the show indefinitely on Wednesday, September 17.
In response, fans of Kimmel and advocates for free speech began canceling their Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions, pressuring the network to return the show to the air.
Six days later, Disney reversed its decision, bringing Jimmy Kimmel Live! back with new episodes. However, the show still didn’t air in more than 40 markets, as the Sinclair and Nexstar media groups—owners of numerous local ABC stations—chose to preempt the program for three additional nights before eventually returning it to their regular lineups.
Amid these developments, Kimmel was negotiating with Disney but recently admitted he hadn’t expected Jimmy Kimmel Live! to actually return.
Jimmy Kimmel Opens Up About the Fate of His Show
On Wednesday, October 8, Jimmy Kimmel appeared on Bloomberg Screentime. Instead of conducting his usual tough interviews, he was asked about his return to television after his show had been pulled. When asked whether there was ever a moment during that chaotic week or two when he thought the show might never come back, Kimmel replied,
“Oh yeah. Yeah, I did and I’ll tell you why,” explaining that, being a natural troublemaker, he once made a joke in his first year on air about the Lakers beating the Pistons in the NBA Playoffs, saying something like, “Well I hope they don’t burn Detroit down,” which upset many viewers in Detroit.
He continued, “People were mad and they pulled me off the air in Detroit. A guy whose really been like my mentor at ABC, Alex Wallau, said to me, ‘You know, if we don’t have Detroit, you’re done. The show is over.”
Kimmel explained that, back then, he was told that the show “can’t go forward” with one major market choosing not to air him. So when he learned that there were 40 affiliates not airing his show, Kimmel admitted that he thought his show was over for good.
“‘Well, that’s it,’” Kimmel said, “Because there seemed to be a list of demands presented to me and I was not going to go along with any of them.”
He continued, “So it’s was like, ‘well, I guess we’re done.’ I said to my wife, ‘that’s it. It’s over.’”
Jimmy Kimmel Talks About Returning to ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ After Suspension
“Ultimately, I wanted to address everything I could,” Kimmel said. “Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t. It really had to come from within me—it had to be honest, and I had to lay out my feelings and experiences. I think I accomplished that.”
He added, “I knew it wouldn’t be perfect. There would always be people who disagreed or didn’t accept it, but what mattered most to me was that I could clearly explain what I meant and what I was trying to say.”
Kimmel’s first episode back after the brief suspension became one of the most-watched in over a decade, drawing more than 6 million viewers, even though 23 percent of affiliate networks opted not to air it.