Jimmy Kimmel recently made a surprising confession about his early days hosting Jimmy Kimmel Live!
On Wednesday, October 22, the late-night host, 57, appeared on Ted Danson’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast and revealed he once hoped the network would take Jimmy Kimmel Live! — which premiered on ABC in January 2003 — off the air.
“Somehow I bamboozled them into thinking that I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t know what I was doing, and I would pray that they canceled the show sometimes,” Kimmel admitted. “I didn’t want to quit because I didn’t want to disappoint all the many people who worked for me, but I couldn’t. I was just, I couldn’t do it anymore.”
The comedian shared that he “didn’t have guests many times,” in the beginning, and often relied on people in his circle, including then-girlfriend Sarah Silverman, to come on multiple times.
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“Now keep in mind this show was on, we’d go on the air live at midnight at 12:05 [a.m.], and there were times where it was 5:30 in the afternoon and we didn’t have guests for that night’s show,” Kimmel recalled. “And I would just have to pick up the phone and call my friends. And that’s not how you go into a show. You can’t operate that way.”
However, Kimmel noted the show was able to sustain itself over time.
“Eventually, it stabilized, and we figured out how to do it, and you start building running bits which help,” he told Danson, 77. “That helps keep you afloat, and all these things that we didn’t have.”
As the National Enquirer previously reported, Kimmel’s show was briefly taken off the air last month after comments he made regarding the death of Charlie Kirk — who was shot dead on Wednesday, September 10, while speaking at Utah Valley University — sparked backlash.
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