Say, whatever happened to Jimmy Kimmel? After offering some malicious lies about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, his supporters, and excusing his murderer, Disney and ABC bounced him off the air for a week, turning him into a cause celebre for the limousine liberals in Hollywood for a hot second. Once returned to the airwaves, Kimmel drew another New York Minute of interest from viewers.
And … then Disney got reminded why Kimmel was a liability in the first place. It turns out that the novelty act wore thin with a broader audience, and Kimmel’s ratings returned to the Antifa levels he and Disney had been curating all along (via Instapundit):
The liberal comedian, who roared back to ABC’s airwaves on September 23 after being briefly suspended for inflammatory remarks about the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, has seen his viewership collapse by a staggering 71 percent.
The plunge in numbers puts his program’s future on shakier ground than ever before.
On Thursday, October 2, Jimmy Kimmel Live! averaged just 1.9 million total viewers, down from the 6.5 million who tuned in for his hotly anticipated comeback.
Among the coveted 25-54 demographic, the hemorrhage was even worse with Kimmel drawing only 265,000 viewers, an 85% nosedive from the 1.7 million he had scored just days earlier.
That figure marked his smallest demo audience since the suspension and signals a brutal comedown for a host who had hoped the furore surrounding his suspension would translate into ratings gold.
Well … that didn’t take long. Nor did we think it would. Kimmel has had that platform for more than two decades, and ABC’s late-night audience had all but disappeared before Charlie Kirk’s murder. Like Stephen Colbert at CBS, Kimmel had driven off most potential viewers and now competed for only the most left-leaning audience possible. His lying claim that Kirk’s assassin was a Trump fan came directly out of that hyper-progressive bubble that had formed around Hollywood and Academia despite clear evidence to the contrary, and fit perfectly within Kimmel’s activist oeuvre.
For a week, Kimmel became a circus freak. When the novelty wore off, viewers quickly remembered why they hadn’t watched him for years. He’s not funny; he’s a crybaby.
Late Nighter tried to argue yesterday that Kimmel had actually retained a good share of his boosted audience, based on some esoteric data from another tracking service:
The White House and some news outlets have highlighted a week-to-week ratings decline—and they’re not wrong. According to Live+3 figures for the week of Sept. 29–Oct. 4 (see below), Kimmel averaged 42% fewer total viewers and was down 52% in the advertiser-coveted 18–49 demographic compared to the prior week.
But those numbers only tell half the story. Jimmy Kimmel‘s return from suspension on September 23rd was a televsion event—one that dominated headlines and drew record-breaking ratings.
If you compare Kimmel’s numbers last week to two weeks earlier, he was actually up 45% in total viewers and 52% among younger adults. That was enough to make Jimmy Kimmel Live! last week’s winner in the 11:35 p.m. time slot for the second consecutive week.
Live+3? What about Nielsen, which is the gold standard for advertisers — the metric that actually matters? Mediaite confirms that Kimmel has flatlined since his return on Nielsen numbers, as the Daily Mail reported. And they suggest that Late Nighter might be playing games with comparisons:
The ABC late-night host’s show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, dropped to 1.70 million viewers on Wednesday, October 1 — representing a 74% decrease from the week prior, when he scored a massive 6.48 million viewers for his first show back from suspension.
Those 1.70 million viewers puts Kimmel below his Q2 nightly average of 1.77 million viewers, and a bit above the 1.50 million his show averaged in Q3, between July and September. But comparing to Q3 is not wise, considering Kimmel takes the summer months off from his show.
Here is how Kimmel’s show performed in the week following his return, per Nielsen data:
- Sept. 23: 6.48M viewers
- Sept. 24: 2.43M viewers
- Sept.25: 2.30M viewers
- Sept. 29: 2.85M viewers
- Sept. 30: 2.45M viewers
- Oct. 1: 1.70M viewers
Gutfeld scored 2.98 million viewers (albeit in an earlier time slot), Mediaite notes, “the same as he averaged in Q3.”
What lessons can we draw from this? Novelty only sells if the act is fresh. Kimmel’s act has been stale and predictable for years. When you deliberately curate your audience down to Antifa and its allies, don’t be surprised if the novelty wears off even more quickly.
The better question will be what lessons Disney draws from this. Kimmel’s contract is reportedly up in the spring of next year. They likely won’t do anything with Kimmel before then, but it’s now clearer than ever that this expensive and embarrassing show can’t be salvaged, not even by casting it as a Heroic Stand Against Censorship with a weepy activist at its forefront. When Jimmy Kimmel Live! finally blinks off the air next spring, no one should be surprised that the plug got pulled — not because of Kimmel’s supposed truth-telling to power, but because he’s an ill-informed hack who hasn’t told an honest joke in years.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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