Jimmy Kimmel shared a very heartfelt message with viewers at the top of Jimmy Kimmel Live!‘s final new episode of 2025.
This of course was the year that Kimmel landed again and again in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump. When a mid-September Kimmel monologue drew fire for suggesting that the late Charlie Kirk’s killer was MAGA, Trump-appointed FCC chair Brendan Carr not-so-subtly nudged ABC affiliates to bench JKL.
Not long after two major affiliate groups complied, ABC as a whole suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live!, for what turned out to be less than a week.
“This has been a strange year, it’s been a hard year,” Kimmel said in his Thursday-night monologue. “We’ve had some lows, we’ve had some highs–for me, maybe more than any year in my life.”
Briefly pausing as he got choked up, and through tears, Kimmel forged ahead: “On behalf of all of us on the show, I want to say that we appreciate your support, your enthusiasm. And not just for watching. You literally pulled us out of a hole, and we cannot thank you enough, personally, professionally….
“I know there are a lot harder jobs, but this is not an easy job to do–and sometimes it feels like we’re spinning our wheels,” he shared. “You see so many awful and destructive acts, so much damage we inflict on ourselves on purpose, and it can make you crazy trying to wrap your head around these things that are so clearly wrong.
“You grew up reading Superman and you learned to value truth, justice and the American way, and then you start to realize, especially over the last year, you don’t know where that all went,” he said. “You don’t know what the American way is even more.
“When I hear from people who watch our show that [doing so] makes them feel less crazy, it makes me feel less crazy, too–and I think that’s an important thing,” Kimmel emphatically stated.
In closing, he said, “It’s also important that we as Americans let our friends in other countries who watch the show know that a lot of us are not okay with what is happening, that there is still much more good in this country than bad–and we hope that you will bear with us during this extended psychotic episode that we’re in the middle of.”
Watch Kimmel’s full final monologue of 2025 at the top of this post.
