Jimmy Kimmel may have just accepted Jimmy Kimmel Live!’s first-ever Peabody Award, but he’s sounding less certain than ever about how much runway his ABC late-night show has left.
In a new Vulture profile published Monday, Kimmel says ABC has not yet begun talks with him about what comes after his current contract expires in May 2027.
“I don’t know what ABC is going to want to do,” Kimmel told Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk, who reports that in the past, he and the network have already begun contract negotiations by this point in the year.
That uncertainty comes after Disney extended Kimmel’s deal in December 2025 for just one additional year, rather than the more typical three-year renewal. At the time, the extension ensured Jimmy Kimmel Live! would remain on ABC through May 2027.
“Everything is so tumultuous,” Kimmel said of the shorter renewal. “That seemed to make sense. It’s definitely not how it’s gone in the past.”
“It’s an unusual position to be in,” he added. “But I do still have a year left on my contract, and that’s what I agreed to.”
Kimmel’s Vulture profile arrives at a particularly fraught moment for late night. Kimmel told VanArendonk that watching Stephen Colbert’s Late Show end made him feel “a little bit defeated.”
“In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m looking at my own future,” he said.
Kimmel also pushed back, as he did last month during his Late Show appearance with the Strike Force Five, on the now-familiar industry narrative that late night’s audience has simply disappeared.
“There are far more people watching late-night TV than there ever were, if you look at the number of views me and my colleagues get online every day and add in our linear-television ratings,” he said, calling it “silly” to argue the format has become less relevant.
His diagnosis: “We’re not just dying of natural causes. We’re being poisoned.”
Of CBS’s claims that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was losing $40 million a year, Kimmel said “These are just made-up numbers.”
Kimmel said ABC has told him “quite specifically” that Jimmy Kimmel Live! is profitable. Still, the one-year extension, the lack of new talks, and the political pressure surrounding his show have left him openly contemplating how and when to bring it to an end.
Kimmel has openly flirted with leaving his show in recent years, but he now wants to leave on his own terms, something that has become more complicated since last September, when ABC briefly pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! from the air amid pressure from FCC chair Brendan Carr and station groups following Kimmel’s comments about the political reaction to Charlie Kirk’s murder.
Kimmel told Vulture he still believes there is a real possibility Trump could seize on something he says on air and use it to pressure ABC to cancel the show outright. In both last September’s suspension and his more recent “expectant widow” joke, Kimmel said, “I had the truth on my side as a defense.”
“What if I actually do do something wrong?” he said, laughing. “I mean, that’s inevitable.”
Kimmel compared the current moment to swimming in rough water.
“You’re trying not to drown, and then you’re working on technique, and then you’re timing yourself,” he said. “The water is rough and the waves are very big.”
