A year ago Jimmy Kimmel Live looked like a casualty. Disney and ABC yanked the show off the air last September after Kimmel’s on-air comments about the shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and two of the largest affiliate groups, Nexstar and Sinclair, refused to carry it even after the suspension was lifted. This week ABC announced that the same show finished the 2025-2026 season as its most-watched in eight years, with its strongest adults 18-49 result in four.
The turnaround is real, and the mechanism is not complicated. Controversy brought attention, attention brought viewers, and Kimmel leaned into the fight rather than backing away from it. His return episode last September drew 6.3 million, second only to one night in the show’s history. He also answered his detractors with the kind of line that travels on its own. Responding to sniping about his ratings, he said they were ‘somewhere between a hair in your salad and chlamydia.’
Timing helped too. Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, the ratings leader for nine straight seasons, signed off in May, and its absence cracked open the top of the 11:35 race for the first time in a decade. Kimmel had already closed most of the gap on his own. By the fourth quarter of 2025 he was finishing first in the key demo for the first time ever, and Colbert’s exit handed him whatever advantage remained.
Be clear-eyed about what winning late night means in 2026. The genre is shrinking, budgets are under pressure at every network, and the real audience for these monologues lives on YouTube the next morning rather than on a couch at 11:35. Kimmel is the healthiest patient in a thinning ward. That is still an achievement, and it is a far better place to stand than the one he occupied twelve months ago, when his job looked genuinely in doubt.
The bigger story is about pressure and who blinks first. Advertisers, affiliates, and a hostile administration all had reason to want Kimmel gone, and for a few weeks it seemed they might get their wish. Instead the show returned stronger, and ABC now has a business case, not merely a principled one, for keeping him. As other networks retreat from late night, Kimmel has made the argument that the daypart can still matter. His ratings, for once, are doing the arguing for him.
