First on LateNighter: Wednesday night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! included one word ABC almost certainly didn’t mean to air—though, ironically, it wasn’t actually uttered by anyone on the show itself.
The uncensored F-bomb came in a clip from The Social Reckoning, the upcoming Aaron Sorkin film featuring Wednesday night’s guest, Bill Burr. Burr plays Charlie, a member of Mark Zuckerberg’s legal team.
The expletive lands in the middle of one of Sorkin’s characteristically impassioned speeches. After Jeremy Strong’s Zuckerberg declares himself a “free speech absolutist,” Burr’s character warns him, “The firehose of bad information you are injecting in the air supply is becoming jet-powered. It’s hydraulic. Harm, I promise you, is fucking imminent.”
Watch the clip as it aired during the show’s East Coast broadcast below:
How the moment eluded censors isn’t clear. Despite its name, Jimmy Kimmel Live! now tapes in the late afternoon, giving ABC’s standards-and-practices team plenty of time to catch exactly this sort of thing.
In fact, late-night lore has it that the show stopped regularly broadcasting live a year into its run after censors were unable to keep up with a barrage of swearing from actor Thomas Jane. ABC subsequently moved Kimmel to same-day taping, giving the network a buffer between recording and airtime.
Given FCC chair Brendan Carr’s repeated scrutiny of Kimmel and ABC, an uncensored F-bomb might sound like particularly bad timing. But the slip should carry no regulatory repercussions: Jimmy Kimmel Live! airs during the FCC’s 10 p.m.-to-6 a.m. “safe harbor,” when indecent and profane material may legally be broadcast.
Networks can—and generally do—apply stricter standards of their own, which is why the word is typically censored anyway. Obscene material remains prohibited at all hours.
Ironically, by the time the segment made its way to YouTube later in the evening, the F-bomb had been bleeped—even though YouTube has no equivalent rules barring indecent language.
Kimmel isn’t the only late-night show to let an F-bomb reach the air in recent memory.
When Sabrina Carpenter pulled double duty on Saturday Night Live last fall, she uttered the F-word twice while performing “Nobody’s Son.” Both made it out over the show’s live East Coast broadcast.
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