Jimmy Kimmel Drops Back To Third Place In Late Night Television Ratings

Dragging ABC, Disney, and Bob Iger down with him

Nature is healing. Jimmy Kimmel Live! has fallen back to third place in the “11:35 p.m. ratings race” now that Stephen Colbert has returned from reruns, according to Jed Rosenzweig at LateNighter. Turns out that waving a bloody shirt only gets you so much attention for so long.

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The Bloody Shirt Of Jimmy Kimmel

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While Rosenzweig counts Kimmel as the number 2 network TV host behind Colbert, the Fox News cable channel late night host Greg Gutfeld beats both of them, and has more than a million viewers over Kimmel. Whereas Gutfeld averaged 3.12 million viewers — 223,000 of them in the lucrative 18–49 age bracket (the ‘advertiser demo’) — Kimmel had just 2.11 million total viewers and only 5.78 percent of all late night television viewers in the same bracket.

Notoriety definitely pumped up Kimmel’s numbers while Colbert was on hiatus. “Compared to his pre-suspension levels in early September, the ABC late-night show is still up 37% among total viewers, and up 65% in the demo”, Rosenzweig notes. But the growth in audience share is clearly not permanent.

According to Puck News, it was not Barack Obama or the unions or the free speech champions who won over Iger. Instead, “insiders” tell Kim Masters that it was former chairman and C.E.O. Michael Eisner criticizing Kimmel’s suspension that “stung” Iger, penetrating his “thin skin”.

By this point, Iger and his wife Willow Bay, the dean of USC’s Annenberg School, were reportedly in danger of having their fundraiser for women in media canceled by the host committee. The controversy was endangering their social status among their fellow Hollywood liberals. Quelle horreur!

Bill O’Reilly has reported that “the talent agencies in Los Angeles, all left wing, 100%, threatened Disney and Bob Iger and said, ‘If you don’t put Kimmel back on the air, a lot of our clients are not going to do business with you’”, after which “Iger surrendered on the spot, and then Kimmel went back.”

The Wall Street Journal has corroborated O’Reilly: “Showrunners of marquee Disney series were texting each other about how to express their outrage to the top of the company.” It was an all-out pressure campaign — just like the one that got Gina Carano fired by her talent agent and run out of town for the crime of reasonable statements declared wrongthink. “More than 400 celebrities including Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep signed a letter of protest” before Eisner tweeted his thoughts.

Hollywood’s most powerful agents, including Creative Artists Agency managing partner Bryan Lourd and senior leaders at William Morris Endeavor and the United Talent Agency, were warning the Disney boss and his top lieutenants that taking Jimmy Kimmel off the air had damaged his legacy and his company’s reputation. Top talent, they said, were considering not working with Disney.

Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking this was ever about free speech. Iger did not even need to think twice when he fired Roseanne Barr from her own show for a tweet. None of the talent agents in Los Angeles would ever do this for a conservative actor who got in similar trouble. They have declared Jimmy Kimmel untouchable, but they cannot make him profitable.

There was a great deal of sanctimonious attention to millions of people canceling their Disney+ subscriptions during the Kimmel controversy, about double the normal cancelation rate. Never mind the price hikes that Disney announced at the same time, this was supposedly proof of a massive groundswell of support for Kimmel. It is the logic of people for whom money is not real.

It is worth recalling that before Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X, the ‘bird app’ never once turned a profit. That situation was fine with the progressive left, for they understood the value of the platform for driving narratives. Indeed, the activists had spent a decade perfecting their use of Twitter when it was sold, and Musk’s purchase was his first unpardonable political sin that invoked their wrath.

Media Matters For America tried to frame Elon Musk’s Twitter as a horrible platform for anti-Semitism and temporarily succeeded in getting Bob Iger to suspend Disney advertising on the app. Musk is currently suing MMFA into penury. If not for the purchase debt, X would be profitable today, and in a real sense that is what the cancel culture goon squads wanted to prevent.

Then consider Disney itself. Iger paid $4 billion for Lucasfilm and its intellectual properties, including Star Wars. Disney has yet to make an actual profit on the purchase because the films were terrible and started losing money, while the Disney+ Star Wars shows were terrible and lost the audience. The Acolyte cost $230 million to make and became a joke about cringe Disney content (‘lesbian space witches’). For the creators of this travesty — Kathleen Kennedy and Leslye Headland — the chance to vandalize a boy brand with liberal feminism had been worth any price.

More recently, One Battle After Another was meant to celebrate the Antifa spirit in a post-Trump world. Projected to lose over $100 million now, it is such a stinker that it might not even get any of the Academy Awards that self-important film critics wanted to give it, and there is even talk that Leonardo DiCaprio’s days as a leading man have ended. No one is embarrassed that the movie lost money. They are only embarrassed by how bad it is.

Jimmy Kimmel admits he has no idea whether his show makes money or not. He all but admits that he does not care if he makes a profit. Stephen Colbert, who surpassed Kimmel immediately upon his return from hiatus, reportedly loses tens of millions of dollars a year. Massive spending is intrinsic to the political project, so these people do not care that they go broke promoting woke.