Jimmy Kimmel has spent years openly wondering when he might be ready to leave late night. These days, though, he says he’s finding more reasons to stay.
Speaking alongside wife and Jimmy Kimmel Live! executive producer and co-head writer Molly McNearney on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, Kimmel said he still regularly asks himself whether the demands of doing a nightly show are worth it. But he says that question weighs on him less now than it once did.
“Weirdly, I deal with it less now than I used to because now I feel like… this show is an outlet for people who are outraged by what’s going on, and I feel some responsibility to those people,” Kimmel said. “So it’s not just like, ‘Man, why do I need to get up in the…’ It’s like, well, yeah, there is kind of a reason, a non-financial reason that you need to do this.”
The shift is notable as Kimmel approaches another potential decision point in his career. His current ABC contract runs through May 2027, following an unusual one-year extension signed last December. Sources told LateNighter at the time that the deal was widely viewed inside the network as a possible final chapter for Kimmel’s run, though he’s changed his mind about retirement before.
More recently, Kimmel told Vulture that ABC had not yet begun talks with him about what comes after the current deal. “I don’t know what ABC is going to want to do,” he said, adding that watching Stephen Colbert’s Late Show come to an end made him feel as though he was “looking at my own future.”
McNearney, meanwhile, told Shepard she feels pulled in both directions. From the standpoint of “the nervous system of the household,” she said, retirement sounds appealing. She can picture her husband “with a fly rod in one hand and a torch in the other,” finally getting a chance to relax. But she also believes his voice remains important.
Kimmel acknowledged another concern: walking away and then wishing he hadn’t.
Asked whether he worries he could retire only to regret the decision a couple of years later, Kimmel answered, “Yeah, I do.” He said he has watched others announce their retirement only to make “a lesser comeback” attempting to recreate what they left behind.
“I always look at that and go, ‘Oh, is that gonna be me?’” he said.
As for what retirement would actually look like, Kimmel isn’t envisioning a life of doing nothing.
“It depends on what you mean by retirement,” he said. “I’m never gonna stop doing things.”
