We told you earlier that Jimmy Kimmel had refused to apologize for his disgusting remarks about the Charlie Kirk assassin and was going to double down on his attacks on MAGA. ABC knew if he did that they’d be forced to take more drastic measures.
And we also told you that media outlets like the New York Times are blaming FCC Director Brendan Carr, claiming that ABC was placating the Trump administration because of Carr’s comments.
But now we are learning, from The Hollywood Reporter, that it appears what really led to the canceling of the show was a revolt from both advertisers and affiliate conglomerates, and not the comments made by Brendan Carr, as plenty of media are reporting.
Here’s more from THR:
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.
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.
I’m honestly not sure that Kimmel’s show will survive all of this and I couldn’t be happier about it. It’s being reported that Kimmel was only getting 129,000 viewers in the coveted demo:
