Jimmy Kimmel is sharing his thoughts on the future of late-night television and says he feels “defeated” by Stephen Colbert‘s cancellation.
In an interview with Vulture, Kimmel insisted that “there are far more people watching late-night TV than there ever were, if you look at the number of views me and my colleagues get online every day and add in our linear-television ratings.” He added it’s “silly” to call the format less relevant: “We’re not just dying of natural causes. We’re being poisoned.”
He recalled in 2023, CBS encouraged him to sign a five-year contract and he opted for three instead. CBS’s explanation when the network pulled the show two years later was that it was losing significant amounts of money, some $40 million a year, according to reports. He asks why CBS would have asked him to sign a five-contract if the show was losing so much money. “Am I to believe that over the course of those two years, they suddenly started losing $40 million a year?” Kimmel says. “These are just made-up numbers.”
He also reflected on his friend and colleague Colbert’s cancellation. “I feel a little bit defeated by it,” he told Vulture following the airing of Colbert’s finale. “In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m looking at my own future.”
Kimmel has been a frequent critic of Donald Trump and in September 2025 ABC pulled his show “indefinitely” after he offered his take on the reaction to the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk. The network made the decision after FCC chairman Brendan Carr threatened ABC to “find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC,” and ,inutes after Nexstar axed his late night show on the 32 ABC affiliates it owns. ABC/Disney returned the show to the airwaves the following week.
Kimmel was honored recently at the Peabody Awards after months of publicly battling with Trump. “Making jokes about the president in America shouldn’t win you a prize. We have the right, guaranteed by the Constitution, to criticize and satirize our leaders,”
