The FCC is still after ABC; the guy who runs that outfit, Brendan Carr, is dedicated—in an apparent blood oath to his patron, Donald Trump—to finding some pretext to drive Jimmy Kimmel from the air; Disney is still hiring big-ticket defense lawyers to protect its broadcast licenses from unprecedented early challenges.
And into this fevered corporate gunfight rides perhaps the most vilified target in the firmament of hated Trump targets, Rosie O’Donnell—a funny lady with a grudge.
She looked last night to have dressed for the part, stepping out on the Kimmel stage to a long ovation, wearing a pink jacket festooned with Western-style flora of red and green that looked like something the old lasso-twirlers used to wear when they marched in the Rose Parade.
This was a setup for some kind of explosive television.
Not quite—at least last night.
In her initial stint as weeklong guest host for Jimmy Kimmel Live!, O’Donnell was not an in-your-face, nonstop confrontational, Trump-mocking guest host out of the Kimmel mode.
And she was clearly making a point of that.
Beginning with an extra-long, 15-minute-plus monologue last night, O’Donnell somehow got through the whole thing, the entire show, never once uttering the name “Donald Trump.”
When was the last time that happened on a show with Jimmy Kimmel’s name on it?
Surely JKL got some additional tune-in last night from the anticipation of seeing an especially colorful fireworks display, perhaps enough to compel a wee-hours call to Brendan Carr’s cell with new instructions on how to violate the First Amendment.
But the show, or more likely Rosie, went for a few feints instead of wild-swinging slashes with her verbal swordplay.
O’Donnell had another arsenal at hand: the polished, funny storytelling that had powered her recent one-woman show, Common Knowledge, with tales of her new life in Ireland, her family and the oddities of being Rosie O’Donnell in 2026.
That didn’t mean the world-famous elephant now resident in the Oval Office went entirely unacknowledged.
Early on, O’Donnell said, “The President hated Jimmy Kimmel Live! when it was hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. Buckle up, people, buckle up.”
That sounded promising/ominous, depending on who was watching.
She also referenced the rationale for her decision to leave America for Ireland: “Because of the Mango Mussolini.” That surely sounded like a title the full-time host has worked into a monologue sometime in the past decade.
The series of Ireland tales O’Donnell related included mention of her child telling classmates the family had to leave “because the President of the United States hates my mother,” though adding that, in all fairness, “my mother hates him more.”
And that was enough to induce O’Donnell into making a small hand-wave gesture and saying: “Hi, I know you’re watching.”
If that moment moved lots of Kimmel fans, and that over-addicted-to-TV viewer in the White House, closer to the edge of their seats and ready for the rumble, they were quickly diverted as some long personal anecdotes about the host’s new life in the Old Country, some jokes about Irish drinking habits and tales of dealing with a personally intrusive school crossing guard drifted by.
If he really was watching, Trump may have been asking everyone on his staff, whom he put on notice to watch along with him, how he could have missed O’Donnell coming after him by name.
He missed it because she never did it. Not even through the night’s guest appearances, where more slant slams got some airtime.
Like: guest Ana Gasteyer, in a pre-planned bit, talking about having something in common with O’Donnell: living “rent-free” in someone else’s head.
Gasteyer’s tormentor, she explained, was one September L. Davis—actually Gasteyer’s own campy stage alter ego, whom she is taking Off-Broadway next month for a nine-performance solo show, September L. Davis: The Apology Tour.
She brought along a photo of Davis—Gasteyer herself in an orange-ish curly wig—who, according to Gasteyer, has been spending much of her time dogging her.
O’Donnell got in a joke about that being “somebody with weird hair too.”
But nobody said the “T” word that time either.
For all the abiding enmity between O’Donnell and Trump, this edition of JKL was almost mild enough to have been an edition of O’Donnell’s daytime show from the late ’90s to the early aughts, when she was, for a time, a television phenomenon. She even brought back the Koosh balls she famously used to fling into the audience and adorned Kimmel’s desk with the kind of personal ephemera that once crowded her old daytime set.
(The daytime vibe was reinforced by O’Donnell’s appropriate and appropriately sensitive tribute to the sad passing of actress Hayden Panettiere, who, she recalled, had been a frequent guest on her old show when she was a child actress.)
O’Donnell noted that she had been labeled “The Queen of Nice” back in those days, which drew knowing laughs from an audience primed to be with O’Donnell, no matter what.
Neither she nor anyone else mentioned that O’Donnell had been the subject of one of Trump’s earliest excursions into crude commentary in campaign mode when, responding to a question about his having called women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals” during a presidential debate, Trump defended himself by saying: “Only Rosie O’Donnell.”
But they probably didn’t have to. That line set the precedent for the kind of tone that would define Trump’s stewardship of the White House.
The opportunity was there for O’Donnell to come back with a vengeance, especially in a week with the usual quota of outrages, from dismissing the concerns of Navy families over conditions for sailors on overextended assignments in the Strait of Hormuz, to the caper hiding in a catering cart to escape Iranian threats, to the latest in all-time financial grifting moves, to abusive comments earlier in the day directed at a female CNN reporter.
O’Donnell steered clear of all that, deliberately, saying, almost as an aside: “He’s in the White House crying because I haven’t mentioned him.”
But the week is young.
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She basically pulled a Late Show finale tone, keeping the joy and funny jokes coming while keeping the President aggravated by barely acknowledging his existence to some extent.
Now that may not be the case as you said, so I hope this was just a warm-up and not the foreshadowed precursor for the whole week~
I’m just happy that her return to the talk show circuit was received very well and looking forward to the rest of her stint~
Rosie is good at Television Leaving this great medium caused her to become both obsessed and delusional. Television is her therapy and entertaining people is her passion.
Bill, Please. “Lighten up ‘Francis.'”
Grow the fuck up!