After Disney’s ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel, fear and anger are rippling through the late-night world as many wonder where the ax could fall next.
“When they came for Colbert, they cloaked it in ‘he didn’t make enough money,’ but with Kimmel, they just brazenly did it,” Kurt Braunohler, a comedian who’s been a writer on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” posted on Instagram.
Kimmel is the second late-night host, after CBS’s Stephen Colbert, to be yanked following pressure from President Donald Trump. CBS said the cancellation was “purely a financial decision,” and Reuters reported that Colbert was losing roughly $40 million a year.
“There’s a sense of alarm,” a former Jimmy Fallon staffer told Business Insider. “Among my friends, there’s a really practical feeling of, there’s no jobs left, and people are freaking out about that.”
“I’m enraged,” a third veteran of the late-night shows said of Kimmel’s suspension. “It’s a scary time in late-night now. Nobody knows what’s next.”
After Kimmel’s suspension, Trump went on to urge Comcast’s NBCUniversal to cancel its late-night hosts, NBC’s Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.
“The message to those NBC shows is, if you don’t fall in line, we’re going to do the same thing to you,” comedy writer Adam Conover said. “Imagine being Seth Meyers right now. His work is more political than Jimmy Fallon’s.”
Both hosts addressed the situation on their shows on Thursday, standing up for Kimmel and promising not to change their approach. Meyers, who has regularly mocked Trump, focused on free speech on his show, “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” Fallon, who’s less political and more mainstream, took jabs at Trump’s UK trip, with a mock censor partially obscuring his jokes.
It’s a nervous time. The economy of late-night TV was fragile before Trump’s attacks. People are shifting more of their entertainment viewing to streaming services and are increasingly likely to watch late-night clips on YouTube the next day rather than live, undermining broadcasters’ audience and ad revenue. Streamers have largely been unable to replicate late-night appointment viewing on their services. Comedy podcasts have flourished on open platforms, but can’t replace the scale of a late-night network TV show staff.
“Late night won’t have a future,” said Brandon Burkhart, a recent Fallon writer who now has a comedy podcast. “It’s going to be a major contraction in the next few years until streaming figures out how to do late night. A lot of crew and writers will be out of work.”
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The Writers Guild of America West, the union representing Hollywood writers, organized rallies outside Disney offices in Los Angeles and New York to demand that Kimmel be brought back. Meredith Stiehm, president of the WGA West, said around 200 people showed up in LA. Anger was directed as much at their corporate leaders as the White House.
“It started with Colbert, but the Kimmel news crossed a line for everybody,” Stiehm said. “We’d like them to put Jimmy Kimmel back on the air and put his workers back to work. It’s not just his writers but all the people who work on the show who are being punished for exercising their free expression.”
People held signs at the New York rally denouncing Trump and Disney and chanted, “Bring Jimmy back.”
One attendee, Natasha Vaynblat, a former “Tonight Show” writer, said she was motivated by her parents’ immigration from Russia and hoped the gathering would encourage others to speak out.
“I’m worried we’re turning into an authoritarian regime,” she said.
Some see the Kimmel situation as a symptom of media consolidation that has created the need for government approval while reducing competition.
“It shows why media mergers are so bad — when you have all these companies under one roof, the more they depend on political largesse,” Conover said.
