It’s been nearly a year since the last late-night show on broadcast TV aired a new Friday night episode, but this week Jimmy Kimmel is set to break the streak.
With the Oklahoma City Thunder set to face off against the Indiana Pacers in game four of the NBA finals Friday night at 8:30pm ET, Jimmy Kimmel Live! will air a new episode following the game.
It will be the show’s first new Friday night episode since last year’s NBA finals. At the time, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon was still producing five new episodes a week. (Fallon aired his last Friday episode several weeks later.)
Kimmel, who spent this past weekend taping this summer’s run of ABC’s Who Wants to Be Millionaire, is taking tonight off instead, with ABC airing a repeat of his May 29th episode with guests Ricky Gervais, Kaitlyn Dever and Kali Uchis.
The NBA Finals have long been a ratings boon for Kimmel’s show. For fifteen years, Kimmel produced a special “Game Night” edition of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which aired in primetime on the east coast as a lead-in to the games. (That tradition ended in 2023 when the start time for the games was moved up from 9pm ET to 8:30pm ET.)
Kimmel isn’t the only late-night host known to occasionally produce a new episode on what’s usually a dark night for his show. Earlier this season, both Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert both aired special Sunday night editions of their shows following NFL football coverage on their networks.
Kimmel’s scheduled guests Friday night are David Spade and Wiz Khalifa.
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I do not ever miss seeing The Jimmy Kimmel show. I have been in his audience 3 times.
He actually did a Friday episode last year the first week of his return after Labor Day. I’d imagine the reason was that he only would have 3 recent shows featuring him to rerun otherwise