Jimmy Kimmel Just Bluntly Revealed The 1 Very Personal Thing He Didn’t “Want America To See” After ABC Ripped His Show Off The Air
“Our daughter, who’s 11 years old, said, ‘I can sell my Labubus…”
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As we know, Jimmy Kimmel Live! was briefly pulled off the air by ABC after being pressured by the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, back in September.
While ABC decided to bring back Jimmy’s show after a week, no one knew exactly what had happened behind the scenes when news officially broke… until now
Last night, Jimmy Kimmel visited The Late Show with Stephen Colbert as a guest while he was in New York for his annual week-long run in Brooklyn… and, as Stephen made clear in the interview, this was Jimmy’s first public interview since ABC put his show on pause and brought it back.
The video, which was posted on The Late Show’s YouTube channel, began with Stephen asking Jimmy, “Have you recovered from the emotional roller coaster yet?”
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Jimmy agreed that it was an emotional roller coaster. “It really was; it was very strange,” he told Stephen.
Next, he gave a minute-by-minute play of what happened when he found out the news: “It was about 3 p.m. We tape our show at 4:30 p.m. I’m in my office, typing away as I usually do. I get a phone call; it’s ABC. They say they want to talk to me.”
“This is unusual,” Jimmy continued. “As far as I knew, they didn’t even know I was doing a show previous to this. So I have a lot of people, I have like five people who work in my office with me, so the only private place to go is the bathroom.”
“So I go into the bathroom, and I’m on the phone with ABC executives, and they say, ‘Listen, we want to take the temperature down. We are concerned about what you’re going to say tonight, and we’ve decided to take the show off the air,” he said.
Right after recounting this moment to Stephen, the in-studio audience booed, and Jimmy joked and said, “That’s what I said. I started booing.” Then he continued with the story. “I said, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ and they said, ‘Well, we think it’s a good idea.’ And there was a vote, and I lost the vote.”
Some of the audience started to boo again, and Jimmy joked, “So, I put my pants back on, I walked out of the office, and I called in some of the executive producers. There are about nine people in [the office], and I said, ‘They’re pulling the show off the air.’ My wife said I was whiter than [comedian] Jim Gaffigan when I came out of there.”
Stephen then asked, “What was the first thing that occurred to you?” Jimmy answered, “I thought, ‘That’s it; it’s over. I’m never coming back on air, that’s really what I thought.”
Jimmy continued, “So we told our staff… meanwhile, the whole audience is in their seats!” This news shocked Stephen, “Oh, wait, I didn’t know your audience was already loaded!” And Jimmy nods in agreement and adds, “They’re loaded and in their seats, ready for the show. We had a chef, a guy named Christian Petroni, on the show who was making meatballs and polenta that night. He’d been cooking all day.”
Then Jimmy talks about having singer and musician Howard Jones on the show, who was taping a performance. “The song he did do — because we decided to tape it anyway, even though we sent our audience home — in front of our disappointed employees: ‘Things Can Only Get Better,’ which you can take two ways, right?” he joked.
Jimmy continues the recap: “Then we said, ‘Oh, we sent the audience home, so we need the staff to go in and listen to Howard Jones and pretend to be the audience… and then, the staff ate polenta and meatballs after.”
“We get to the house, and we’re shaken. The kids are up — I’ve got two kids — and our daughter, who’s 11 years old, said, ‘I can sell my Labubus’ … Our son just got naked and started running around the house,” he said.
“It was like a DUI in LA: Three days in jail. I couldn’t say anything; I just had to sit quiet and make a lot of phone calls and take a lot of phone calls. You were very kind to call me,” Jimmy said as he pointed to Stephen. “We spoke about this — certainly you know well.”
For the rest of the conversation between Stephen and Jimmy, they discussed everyone who texted them when they each heard about their respective cancellations. Stephen eventually had to cut to a commercial break.
After the video posted, viewers in the comments were giving Jimmy and Stephen lots of love:
“Stephen and Jimmy are helping me and a lot of others, stay sane. Protect them at all costs,” one user said.
“‘I can sell my Labubus.’ – that made me cry as a parent. what a sweet daughter,” one person said.
“They’re smarter, kinder and better humans than him. He hates that. Heroes from wherever we can get them. FDT”
You can watch the full video below:
So what are your thoughts on this conversation between Jimmy and Stephen? Tell us what you feel and why in the comments below.