Nearly one year after ABC temporarily pulled the plug on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” the late-night host is opening up about his week off the air.
Kimmel sat down with Dax Shepard for the Monday, August 24, episode of his “Armchair Expert” podcast where he revealed that he considered retiring.
Possibly the End
Kimmel, joined by wife Molly McNearney, explained that after the controversy that got him suspended from his talk show job, he considered calling it quits.
“Were you at any point going like, ‘Ah, okay. I’m retired.’ Was there any little window where you’re like, maybe I need to embrace this, and maybe I’m excited for that?” Shepard asked Kimmel in a video shared via YouTube.
“I mean, it’s funny. It’s more immediate than that. It’s more like, ‘Okay, so all right, so I don’t have to do a show on Monday, you know?'” Kimmel explained. “That’s kind of how I looked at like. ‘All right, well, the good news is I don’t have to do a show. I don’t have to work tomorrow.'”
He continued, “Of course it turned out to be a much more stressful workday than the usual workday. But yeah, there was a little bit of that.”
Kimmel went on to say that he often deals with the thoughts of “I don’t need this.”
“I deal with it less now than I used to because now I feel like the show is an outlet for people who are outraged by what’s going on, and I feel some responsibility to those people,” he explained. “It’s like, well yeah there is kind of a reason, a non-financial reason that you need to do this.”
2025 Controversy
“Jimmy Kimmel Live!” was pulled from the air on September 17, 2025, after comments made about the death of Charlie Kirk.
The show was reinstated just one week later, with Disney releasing a statement saying, “Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country. It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive.”
The statement continued, “We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”
Kimmel returned to his show on September 23 with an emotional monologue.
“Maybe most of all,” Kimmel said at the time. “I want to thank the people who don’t support my show and what I believe, but support my right to share those beliefs anyway.”
He continued, “I don’t think what I say is going to make much of a difference. If you like me, you like me; if you don’t, you don’t… it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man.”
Three months after the controversy, Kimmel and Disney/ABC reached an agreement to extend the late-night show’s contract into 2027.
“I am pleased to announce another no-talent year!” the host captioned his Instagram announcement.
