Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show is coming back to ABC on Tuesday after negotiations with Disney, the company told NOTUS in a statement.
“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country,” The Walt Disney Company wrote. “It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”
ABC suspended “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” last week after the late-night show host speculated about the political affiliation of the man accused of fatally shooting Charlie Kirk at a university event in Utah earlier this month.
“The MAGA gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said last Monday. “In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”
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Following the remarks, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr threatened to take action against ABC and its network of affiliate stations.
Within hours, Nexstar, a company that owns and operates dozens of local stations, preempted Kimmel’s show “for the foreseeable future” — a decision that led ABC to suspend Kimmel’s show.
“Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views, or values of the local communities in which we are located,” Nexstar’s president, Andrew Alford, said in a release at the time. “Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time, and we have made the difficult decision to preempt his show in an effort to let cooler heads prevail as we move toward the resumption of respectful, constructive dialogue.”
Notably, Nexstar is currently undergoing the FCC approval process for a more than $6-billion acquisition of news media organization Tegna Inc., which would make it the largest owner of local news stations in the country.
Neither Nexstar nor Sinclair — another company that owns and operates local ABC affiliates across the country and said it would preempt Kimmel’s show — responded to NOTUS’ request for comment about whether they would air the program on Tuesday.
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