If it’s true that every show in late-night television is being compelled to slash budgets, cut any extraneous costs, and work smaller, how does anyone explain Jimmy Kimmel in Brooklyn?
He’s back in the borough this week, back at the gorgeous Brooklyn Academy of Music, back with a lineup of really big guests, from Howard Stern to Billy Crystal to Paul McCartney to the new, and—at the moment, anyway—outrageously popular New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
And, according to the show’s co-executive producer Doug DeLuca, who plays a large role in planning and executing the show’s now-regular cross-country sojourns, there is real momentum in the air.
And at the cash register.
DeLuca said that the show had no trouble lining up big corporate sponsors for the week, citing pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and alcoholic beverage company Diageo. “Pfizer and Diageo really stepped up,” DeLuca said before Monday’s initial Brooklyn show, while standing under the Pfizer logo.
Pfizer got what is known as a billboard message at the top of Monday’s show (“brought to you by”), and a happy Pfizer corporate executive was on hand during the pre-show cocktail hour.
DeLuca, like many on the show’s staff, is a lifer, having been at Jimmy Kimmel Live! since its start 23 years ago. He was around, of course, one year ago when Kimmel ventured to Brooklyn only days after being reinstated by Disney/ABC following his brief suspension over a joke that set off a crusade by Donald Trump’s handpicked FCC Chair to force Kimmel off the air.
The mood last year was still a bit shell-shocked from the suspension and the standoff with the Administration, though the staff was full of defiance and admiration for the host’s refusal to cave to political pressure, as so many already had in the corporate, legal, academic, and Washington worlds.
DeLuca said that coming back to Brooklyn again was not a contractual guarantee, meaning ABC signed on—certainly an indication that there is real value to be had in the ambitious road-show week.
And value there is. “The advertisers have gotten their spines back,” DeLuca said before Monday’s show. They’re spending to appear on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
The money is on the screen. The show once again brought in an elaborate set, a mock-up of an old-fashioned Coney Island, with carny booths, a Nathan’s stand, and the peak of The Cyclone in the background. It imported its house band, The Cletones, who rocked the joint hard.
The full-on effort ought to have been expected.
In the wake of CBS’s cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s show in the time period, Kimmel has claimed new status as the dominant ratings leader in late night, drawing 2.5 million or so linear viewers and millions more online, where his monologues can reach five million views a day.
Those online views don’t translate as easily into dollars as they would on traditional TV, but they’re not nothing.
If Kimmel’s growing dominance wasn’t established clearly enough in the numbers, it got visual and auditory confirmation Monday at his Brooklyn show, where the host was greeted by a wildly enthusiastic New York crowd who came for a party as much as a show.
Of course, that won’t change the trajectory of traditional over-the-air television, not with the rising generation of “viewers” averse even to owning television sets.
But what is going on this week in Brooklyn not only certifies Jimmy Kimmel Live! as a hot show, maybe the hottest show on television at this moment in time, but validates the idea of late-night TV as a format with a wellspring of enthusiastic appeal that remains difficult to match outside of live sports.
More than 150,000 people requested tickets for the week. Those lucky enough to score a pair stood outside the elegant BAM building Monday, in lines stretching around the block, in the dripping rain, soaking in the atmosphere.
Is all that going to be replaced by podcasts? That’s the current wisdom: the old-fashioned late-night show is expected to evolve into an appealing host (dozens of them apparently) sitting on camera in radio-style studios, interviewing or bantering amusingly with a guest.
Maybe podcasts will evolve, and have big audiences sitting and laughing inside a sizable TV studio or a big theater, with a band and a monologue and a desk—but wait, that would be a late-night show.
The Emmy-winning actor Jon Hamm, who made a special appearance on Monday night’s edition of JKL as a rude New York construction boss, said after the show that he loves the genre so much he is basically game for doing anything on a late-night show.
Hamm, whose loyalty to late night began in his teen years when he was a fan of David Letterman’s NBC show, has been a frequent presence all over late night since his breakout starring role on Mad Men in 2007.
Beyond regular guest appearances on most of the ongoing series, Hamm has hosted Saturday Night Live four times and made 14 unbilled guest cameos, earning him status as a sort of unofficial cast member.
Sitting in the green room Monday as the first Brooklyn show wrapped, Hamm pointed to the monitor as Kimmel said goodbye to the cheering audience and declared: “Late Night is America. It has to survive.”
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