Kimmel Took the Fight to the Stations—and Brooklyn Didn’t Break

It was a doubleheader win for Jimmy Kimmel and the Disney company Friday, as the two station groups that initiated the move to drive him to cancellation folded and announced they would return Jimmy Kimmel Live! to the air in the markets where they have stations.

The moves took place just in time for Kimmel’s ambitious, star-filled week of shows from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, his latest trip back to his native New York borough.

And if people didn’t know it before, this is further evidence that guys from Brooklyn don’t break easily.

The announcement that both the Nexstar and Sinclair station groups would end their boycotts of the Kimmel show likely played out in a series of backstage negotiations, with Disney pointing out that affiliated stations have only a limited number of preemptions allowed to them before the network can exact penalties.

That reminder may have been all that was needed. Local stations today are much less lucrative investments than they once were, thanks to the easy option for a network to relocate its programming to a streaming service—a business they are already in.

Huge station groups like these two are acutely aware of their profit margins, which would be essentially destroyed if they had to go out and buy programming to fill their schedules as substitutes for what ABC provides.

Of course, ABC’s shows, like almost everything else on linear television, have greatly diminished ratings from the glory days of broadcasting; but the ratings they still get dwarf anything else these local stations could come up with.

And “almost” is a big word in that previous sentence. Because ABC still has rights to a golden ticket to wide, truly national viewing: NFL football.

It is probably unlikely that ABC/Disney negotiators uttered to the executives at Nexstar and Sinclair anything like the words: “We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.”

Because they didn’t have to. The implications of extending the boycott of Kimmel “indefinitely” were surely clear.

Did the management of either of these station groups think all this through before they jumped to accept the not-too-subtle suggestion of Carr to pull Kimmel off the air over the flimsy pretext that he had offended supporters of Charlie Kirk—though the real reason was the bitter animus the President holds toward Kimmel (among others) because of jokes told about him?

Almost surely not. Maybe they can’t be blamed for that, because the track record of companies, law firms, universities, and others caving in to intimidation tactics from the Trump administration was pretty grim.

Disney/ABC itself had been on that list, paying off a nuisance lawsuit against its news division rather than choosing to fight it out in court.

How could they know that a late-night host would embarrass all those weak-willed doormats by deciding he was actually going to say: no, you can’t bully me; you can’t abuse power this way; you can’t interfere with my right to say what I believe and joke about people in power; you can’t undermine American values this way?

At this moment in time, is there any more elevated a personality in American media and culture than Jimmy Kimmel? The entire power of the federal government rose up to lean on him, to squash him like it had squashed so many other, much bigger entities in the past nine months.

And he didn’t break.

He kept his powder dry, worked with his network and corporate bosses, endured the professional obits being written about him all over conservative media and social media—even in the hand of the guy with the slashing Sharpie signature—and he reappeared Tuesday night, unbloodied and completely unbowed.

He took note that night, and the two subsequent nights, that the show was not being seen in some significant parts of the country, including Seattle, St. Louis and even Washington, D.C.

But the show went on, and the viewership was impressive anyway—something else the chieftains at Nexstar and Sinclair may have noticed.

Obviously, the effort to ban him and his right to speech turned Kimmel’s return into an event. But his performance in asserting his rights when he was allowed back was widely celebrated, even by some who had either never really watched him or actively disliked him as a comic performer.

Why? Because Americans generally like people who stand up and fight more than people who cower in the corner. It’s kind of in the country’s DNA.

Kimmel may or may not continue to do his show beyond the end of his contract in May, but he’s written his legacy now, and it’s a proud one—one that underscores the value of providing a forum for a nightly commentator on the state of the nation.

Somebody has to speak comedy to power.

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