Jimmy Kimmel Live! was nearly Jon Stewart Live! During a visit to Ted Danson’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast, Jimmy Kimmel revealed how he inadvertently swiped the ABC gig from fellow comic Jon Stewart.
In the early 2000s, ABC was on the hunt for someone to host a late-night show, said Kimmel. “Nightline was in the slot, and then Bill Maher’s show, Politically Incorrect, followed it,” he continued. “They wanted a traditional late-night talk show in that slot, which nobody knew.” Kimmel said that the network planned to hire the Daily Show host and that his manger, James “Baby Doll” Dixon — who also happens to be Stewart’s manger — “was about to close the deal.” However, that’s when Michael Davies, an ABC executive, told Lloyd Braun, the company’s then-chairman, to “watch a tape of this other guy.”
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“Lloyd watched the tape, and he was like, ‘I think this might be the guy.’ And he brought the tape to Bob Iger, and Iger said, ‘Yeah, I think this might be the guy,” said Kimmel. He called the predicament a “very strange thing,” since Dixon was now in the “difficult position of having to tell John, ‘You’re not going to ABC, but Jimmy is going to ABC.”
“That was a mistake by the way. They definitely should’ve hire Jon,” Kimmel added. “If I’m in that position, there’s no question I hire John 100 times out of a 100.” The former Man Show co-host, who was mystified that he got the gig over Stewart, said he asked Iger why they picked him; Iger replied, “Well, you were cheaper.”
Kimmel concluded his story, telling Danson: “Sometimes it pays to be cheaper.”
The podcast episode posted on Wednesday was filmed just days before ABC “indefinitely” suspended Kimmel on Sept. 17 over comments he made on Jimmy Kimmel Live! about the assassination of far-right activist Charlie Kirk, and following a threat from President Donald Trump’s FCC chair, Brendan Carr.
Following the network’s decision, fellow late-night hosts — Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, John Oliver, Conan O’Brien, James Corden, Jay Leno, Howard Stern, and David Letterman, among them — showed support for Kimmel. Amid the fierce backlash against the network, more than 400 artists and entertainment industry figures signed an open letter published from the ACLU.
On Sept. 22, Disney announced that Jimmy Kimmel Live! would return to the ABC airwaves the next evening. The host’s broadcast return to late-night television brought in 6.2 million views, four times his usual audience, according to data from Nielsen. Kimmel’s first monologue following the suspension also has reached 22 million views on YouTube and counting, making it his most-watched monologue of all time on the platform.
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‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
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