Jimmy Kimmel's return: Why didn't Disney do this last week?

If Disney executives Bob Iger and Dana Walden had let Kimmel say last week what he said last night, this whole controversy could have been avoided.

After watching Jimmy Kimmel’s emotional return to the airwaves last night – nearly a week after Disney executives bowed to pressure from the Trump administration and temporarily suspended him – one thing seemed obvious.

If Disney executives Bob Iger and Dana Walden had just shown some backbone last week and let him speak the way he did last night, all of this controversy could have been avoided.

“It was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man,” Kimmel said, relatively early into an opening monologue that stretched into nearly 30 minutes over two segments. His voice quavering, the late night host made plain, “I don’t think the murderer who shot Charlie Kirk represents anyone.”

He also allowed that people who support President Trump and Kirk’s views might not have seen his comments that way. For the record, he said a week ago Monday: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang 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.”

Last night, Kimmel also applauded people whose views he normally doesn’t agree with, who supported his right for free speech, including Candace Owens, Rand Paul, Ben Shapiro and Ted Cruz.

“I don’t think I’ve ever said this before, but Ted Cruz is right,” he cracked. “It takes courage for them to speak out against this administration.” Later, he noted, “maybe the silver lining from this, is we found one thing we can agree on…Let’s stop letting these politicians tell us what THEY want and tell them what WE want.”

(Kimmel and his sidekick, Guillermo Rodriguez)

I think, sometimes, it is easy to forget that hosts like Kimmel have risen to the top of the game for a reason. Just like his hero, David Letterman, Kimmel has developed a way of connecting with his audience when he speaks from the heart that moves people.

Disney has been paying him a lot of money for many years -- more than two decades – to leverage that talent as host of their signature late night show. They should have trusted in his ability to address the issue last week, instead of looking like willing participants in the Trump administration’s campaign to intimidate and remove voices in media critical of their ideology and actions.

(See me speak with the CBC show Commotion on Kimmel’s return.)

There’s likely lots of reasons why Disney eventually caved, including this petition protesting the suspension from hundreds of artists — including big names like Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Kevin Bacon, Hasan Minhaj, Amber Ruffin and Robert DeNiro. Iger and Walden have enjoyed a lot of goodwill and respect in Hollywood that the Kimmel suspension was quickly draining.

I’m also wondering how stupid the executives at Nextstar and Sinclair must feel, knowing that they forced their affiliates in Washington DC, Seattle, St., Louis and elsewhere to forgo likely the highest ratings they will see in that timeslot all year, simply to curry favor with the Trump administration.

At a time when most younger viewers have no idea what a broadcast station is – believe me, as someone who is teaching media courses at a major university, this is something I’m experiencing daily – it seemed bizarre to me that they would force viewers in these major markets to head for YouTube to watch Kimmel’s return. His appearance last night capped one of the biggest stories in the past week, and these two companies ensured that their ABC affiliates would not be at the center of the action – except to serve as a poster child for bending the knee to Trump.

As I said, I don’t get it. But maybe the folks at Nextstar and Sinclair finally do, now.

Kimmel also made a point of training the bulk of his criticism on Trump and FCC chairman Brendan Carr – featuring the great Robert DeNiro playing a newly hired FCC chair who spoke to the host like a mafioso from Goodfellas or The Godfather. One line I liked from his unnamed character: “I’m gently suggesting that you gently shut the f--- up.”

Kimmel also thanked his audience for standing up to “make your voices heard so mine could be heard,” repeatedly stressing the importance of free speech. He also listed some of the cities where his comeback wouldn’t be airing, thanks to the decisions by Nextstar and Sinclair, noting of Trump “he tried, did his best to cancel me – instead, he forced millions of people to watch the show. That backfired bigly.”

He also thanked his fellow talk show hosts for supporting him and managed a nod to TV talk show history, using the words originally uttered by Tonight Show host Jack Paar, who walked off his own show in the 1960s over a censor cutting a joke and returned some time later with “As I was saying before I was interrupted...”

What I think this episode also showed, was that, despite all the pronouncements of those eager to write the obituary of late-night TV, that people still care about the genre and they still care about its stars. From Stephen Colbert winning an Emmy and getting a standing ovation in the wake of his impending cancellation by CBS to Kimmel sparking worldwide conversations about freedom of speech and the excesses of the Trump administration, the evidence is growing that the public values these voices in ways some may have forgotten.

Full disclosure: I have met Kimmel and watched his evolution for years, interviewing him for NPR back in 2023. I have long admired his growing skill as a host and see him as a not-quite-comic who began his journey as a mostly apolitical everyguy that got increasingly incensed by the excesses of the Trump administration in particular.

It seems obvious now that Trump and Carr overreached, in part, because they underestimated how much people cared about the institution of late night TV and, more importantly, the principle of protecting satirists from the ire of government officials.

(That, by the way, is what makes this incident different from what happened when ABC and Disney canceled the reboot of Roseanne Barr’s classic sitcom after she posted a racist tweet about former Barack Obama aide Valerie Jarrett – nobody in government, which was controlled by Trump in his first term back then, called for her to be fired.)

Let’s hope, now that the dust is settling, that everyone understands where they screwed up and we don’t have to go through this again.