Kimmel defends Colbert amid cancellation, calls Paramount's money excuse 'nonsensical'

USA Today

5 hours ago

If the defense of late-night is a lost cause, Jimmy Kimmel will go down swinging.
The ABC comic told Variety in a recent interview that the money issues Paramount cited for their recent cancellation of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" were "nonsensical." Colbert's show, one of the top-rated programs in the genre, was cancelled permanently earlier this year, with the CBS parent company citing financial difficulties.
Others, however, didn't buy that explanation, positing instead that Paramount, which was hoping for approval of a merger from the Trump Administration's FCC, bent the knee to the president to grease the wheels. The merger was approved shortly after the cancellation was announced.
Kimmel, whose own show is an institution in late-night comedy, falls firmly in that camp.
"I just want to say that the idea that Stephen Colbert's show was losing $40 million a year is beyond nonsensical," the "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" host told Variety in the interview published Aug. 18. "These alleged insiders who supposedly analyze the budgets of the shows −I don't know who they are, but I do know they don't know what they're talking about."
Kimmel went on to say that those claiming Colbert was hemorrhaging money were too focused on advertising revenue, and not looking at the whole pie, which includes affiliate fees: the dollar amounts TV providers pay networks for the right to carry their channels.
USA TODAY has reached out to Paramount for comment.
"It really is surprising how little the media seems to know about how the media works. There's just not a snowball's chance in hell that that's anywhere near accurate," he said, later adding: "Who knows what's true? All I know is they keep paying us − and that's kind of all you need to know."
He also expressed frustration at the narrative that the late-night format is a "rotting corpse," which he called a "great storyline for the press" but "simply not true."
"The idea that late-night is dead is simply untrue. People just aren't watching it on network television in the numbers they used to − or live, for that matter," Kimmel told the outlet, pointing to growing viewership on streaming and YouTube. Whether those formats add up to the same payout as a live audience is a different story, however.
The media environment, across genres, has been contorting rapidly for over a decade, as creators of myriad forms of content compete for shrinking attention spans in an increasingly crowded market. Whether Colbert, Kimmel, and their comrades on NBC can break through the noise is an ongoing experiment. But, in the meantime, Kimmel says he's hoping Colbert can nab an Emmy.
"It seems like voting for Stephen is the least we could do at this point, and I think it will be a nice statement if he does win," he said of the television awards. "Obviously, awards don't mean much, but every once in a while they do, and in this case, I think it will. So I fully expect Stephen to win the Emmy as I think people are very, very upset about what happened to him and his show."