Was Kimmel's 'Dismissal' a Ploy?

It turns out that the return of Jimmy Kimmel to Late Nights on ABC wasn’t the ratings draw they’d hoped. That Park Place reports:

Disney and ABC spent much of this week trying to trumpet the big Jimmy Kimmel return to late-night television (after the host spread misinformation about the Charlie Kirk tragedy) as a ratings comeback story. On paper, the numbers for his first night back looked like a victory: roughly 6.3 million viewers tuned in on September 23rd, marking his strongest performance in over a decade. But the spike didn’t last.

By the very next night, viewership had plummeted to about 2.4 million, according to Nielsen ratings cited by OutKick. That represents a 60–70% overnight collapse. In plain terms, most of the audience that tuned in to see what the fuss was about immediately vanished, leaving Kimmel right back in the rut he was in before suspension.

Let’s look at this together because I think I’ve got this figured out. Kimmel’s on-air claim that Charlie Kirk’s killer was right-wing, which got him initially pushed out, was bogus from the word go. I don’t want to be accused of underestimating Kimmel’s intelligence, and so I’ll say he must have known this before he made the claim, but did it anyway. Everybody knew this. I mean, everybody. That’s got me wondering a bit, smelling a setup. Questioning if his removal wasn’t engineered to get folks chattering about him.

Sound far-fetched? Maybe. Maybe not. Remember, I’m a veteran of about 15 years of Broadcast radio experience, so I know how the game gets played, having played it myself. 

Many years ago, I worked at an AM radio station that was changing formats. We made no advance announcement about the change. We simply started playing one song, the Eurythmics' big hit, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)," which was a current hit at the time. We didn’t just play it once, but over and over again, back to back for the next 24 hours, non-stop. We would intro John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy," and hit the Eurythmics. We’d back sell Denver, intro Aretha’s “Respect,” but we’d play the Eurythmics again. So on and so on. Over and over.

The local police eventually got called. Our news department heard the radio call, so by the time the officer showed up, I had barricaded myself in the Master Control room with a heavy (and long disused) equipment rack lying askew in front of the studio door. He took a look around, let out a dry chuckle, and left. The local newspaper showed up too. By the time the 24 hours were up, we didn’t have many listeners, but we did have the entire city talking about us.

When we finally did come out in the new format, the listenership numbers spiked, just as Kimmel’s did. The new format only lasted about a year, but we had fun setting it up, anyway.

We know, as I mentioned in my last piece on Kimmel, his viewer numbers have been on a downward arc for some months now. ABC’s been losing money on him at the rate of millions per year, and those numbers were getting worse. One can easily imagine the conversation in the network offices.

Now, this is speculation, but it fits perfectly.

One of the biggest truths in entertainment is that controversy sells. Between that and the experience I’ve just described to you, it strikes me as more than possible that they were trying to boost his numbers by creating the controversy with that bogus claim he made. 

Consider the results: It gets some folks mad at him and others worshipping their hero with an online intensity that had been missing for some months, but he’s pretty sure by the end of the week what’s going to dominate the water cooler conversation. He gets a vacation for a few days and a boost in ratings. The thing is, as the numbers above show, it didn’t work for more than one night. 

There are other considerations for this scenario. As I say, ABC is losing money on the guy, but in my previous piece, I mentioned that Kimmel was seen entering his lawyer’s offices. I suggested, based on that report, that some legal action or at least negotiation was going to happen.

Yes, ABC has been wanting to unload Kimmel for some time or boost his numbers. They couldn’t go on long-term with that kind of financial loss. However, I’m thinking ABC looked at that and recognized that the short-term consequence of dealing with that case (even assuming the network won the case) was going to be a higher cost than just putting him back on.

Here’s the kicker: ABC won’t need to keep him on very long.

How do I know this? Because an aspect of this that’s little reported is that Kimmel’s contract runs out in early 2026, according to the U.S. version of The Sun. 

If his numbers got a long-term boost by way of the ploy, so much the better from the POV of both Kimmel and the network. Assuming it doesn’t work (as appears to be the case), they’ve saved a lot of legal fees, and still won’t have to carry him for long. So we’ll see what happens in a couple of months.

Meanwhile, don't let the mainstream media fool you into thinking that Kimmel is seeing huge long-term viewer gains over this. He's not.

One positive thing that has come out of this for the country is that Kimmel’s reinstatement, however temporary it may end up being, has put a spike through the heart of the conspiracy theory that Donald Trump and company arranged his erstwhile dismissal. Not that that fact will stop Kimmel’s defenders from spreading that notion any more than the facts stopped Kimmel from telling everyone that a right-wing extremist killed Charlie Kirk.

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