Six months after James Talarico’s interview with Stephen Colbert was kept off broadcast television and shunted to YouTube, Jimmy Kimmel is about to do it all over again.
Kimmel announced during his monologue Wednesday night that he will interview the Democratic Texas Senate nominee on Thursday—but the conversation will not air on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Instead, viewers will have to watch it on the show’s YouTube channel.
“For a lot of years, for the whole 20-plus years of our show, in fact, I’ve been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all,” Kimmel told viewers.
Kimmel noted that his own past political guests have included Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump, whom he interviewed twice while Trump was running for president.
“But for some reason, and I can’t seem to figure out what that reason is, something has changed,” Kimmel said. “Now that he’s president, his FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates, our local stations, based on simple traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings it would seem they don’t like.”
Kimmel said the decision to keep Talarico off the ABC broadcast was made with those affiliates in mind.
“And so out of consideration for our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas who would have to deal with this nonsense, my interview tomorrow with James Talarico will not air on television,” he said. “It will be posted on YouTube instead.”
The setup is strikingly similar to what happened in February, when Stephen Colbert revealed that CBS lawyers had advised against airing his own interview with Talarico amid concerns about the FCC’s equal-time rules.
Colbert conducted the interview anyway and posted it to The Late Show’s YouTube channel. The controversy surrounding the decision quickly made the conversation one of Colbert’s most-watched interviews on the platform, while introducing Talarico to millions of viewers who otherwise might never have seen it.
It also produced an immediate windfall for Talarico’s Senate campaign. His campaign said it raised $2.5 million in the 24 hours following the controversy, its biggest single fundraising day at the time.
Less than three weeks later, Talarico defeated Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the Democratic Senate primary. Contemporary coverage pointed to the burst of national attention surrounding the Colbert interview as one of the notable late developments in the race.
Now Talarico is running against Republican nominee Ken Paxton in November—and apparently still can’t get a late-night interview onto broadcast television.
“If you wanna learn about a candidate for the Senate tomorrow, you will have to go to the Jimmy Kimmel Live! YouTube channel where you will see it in its entirety,” Kimmel said.
“And thank goodness we have that,” he added, “because in the America we live in right now, that is the best that we can do until November.”
