Details are Coming Out About How Disney Worried the Jimmy Kimmel 'Shitstorm' Was Becoming 'a Bigger Swirl'

Matt Sayles. Getty Images.

As Americans all stand here, staring across the chasm at each other from both sides of the San Andreas-like fault line that has opened up and divided the culture - namely, late night talk shows - it's a reminder of what Miguel de Cervantes said in Don Quixote:

"Facts are the enemy of truth." 

And since that's a story about a lunatic who cosplayed as a chivalrous knight and tried to fight windmills because he convinced himself they were angry giants, it seems to fit this moment in history even better than it did in the early 1600s. 

So when Jimmy Kimmel worked a bit about the assassination of Charlie Kirk into his monologue Monday night, depending on which rim of that cultural gorge you're looking from, he was either championing every American's inalienable, God-given right to free expression, or he was mocking the homicide of a man who was shot in the back while exercising his inalienable, God-given right to free expression. It's been a binary choice. One or the other. If you're interested in staking out a middle ground between those points of view, you'll find it at the bottom of the canyon. And no one will hear a word you say over all the shouting into the void that's going on. 

Still, it's at least worth hearing what went on in the upper levels of the corporation that has suspended Kimmel indefinitely so we can better understand this latest existential crisis we're all screaming at each other about:

Source - On Wednesday, Disney caved to pressure from various partners and benched Jimmy Kimmel Live! Ultimately, the decision was Bob Iger’s and Dana Walden’s — but there was more leading up to it than previously reported. …

"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said during the monologue.

The joke kicked off a “social-media shitstorm,” a source with information tells The Hollywood Reporter. It died down — temporarily.

But almost immediately after FCC chair Brendan Carr’s appearance on Benny Johnson’s podcast, the storm of shit “became a bigger swirl.”

Within hours, multiple ABC station owners held calls with senior Disney leadership expressing their concern with the comments, a second source tells THR.

Inside of ABC, “multiple conversations” with Kimmel were had at the “executive level,” the first person says, though the talks had not yet reached Bob Iger or TV head Dana Walden. The execs wanted to know: How was Kimmel going to address the situation on Wednesday night’s show? 

The answer was not satisfactory to management, sources say. Meanwhile, the advertiser calls began to roll in and then the big affiliate conglomerates, Nexstar and Sinclair, threatened to preempt the show. … The situation became a safety issue as Disney employees saw their emails doxxed, per the first source — some even received death threats. Disney wanted Kimmel to address the situation in a way that “would take down the temperature,” but what he had planned was “going to fan the flames with the MAGA fan base,” the source says.

A source at Jimmy Kimmel Live! counters to THR that Kimmel’s planned on-air address was not “making it worse,” but that he simply “wasn’t kowtowing” to the outrage.

Kimmel was “defending what he said [as] being grossly mischaracterized by a certain group of people,” the show source says.

THR reported on Wednesday that Kimmel did not plan to apologize for his comments, but did plan to address the situation on-air.

Talks between Kimmel and Disney/ABC hit enough of a stalemate that executives there decided Wednesday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! had run out of time to be salvaged. …

By this point, 66 of the roughly 200 affiliate stations had said they would not carry the episode — that’s when ABC announced it was suspending the program — a Bob Iger and Dana Walden joint decision that was a “last resort,” the first person says. Walden delivered the news to Kimmel but did not ask him to apologize, says the source, who described Wednesday as “a very heavy, very hard day” inside the walls of Disney and ABC.    

Assuming this is how things went down, and this sounds really well researched so there's no reason to doubt it, I have to say, this is a great look for Jimmy Kimmel. I respect anyone who's willing to stand up for himself, to own his words, even when he had to know he could lose his show over it. We're just one generation from Lenny Bruce walking into a comedy club where the NYPD was standing by, ready to arrest him on public indecency charges, and using the word "cocksucker" anyway. That sort of courage-of-your-convictions is getting rarer by the day. So good on him for not being willing to cave.

Besides, whether you're on the left or the right, and the mob on right or the left is calling for your head but you don't think you're in the wrong, you should never apologize and never "kowtow." The apology never gets accepted anyway. It only makes you come across like a wounded animal and your enemies only hungrier for the taste of your blood.

And I would've loved to have heard his version of all this. I'm no fan of JKL. I don't think I've watched a late night show since Conan went off the air. But this would've been appointment TV. (At least in the morning on YouTube, which is the only way anyone consumes these shows any more.) As much as I loved Kimmel on The Man Show, his late night schtick has been to position himself as a preachy, pedantic scold. More interested in generating clapture from his audience of LA wine moms than actual social satire. But personal tastes aside, we all missed out by not getting to hear how he would've explained this. 

Though to be fair to Disney, they were probably smart to want to "take down the temperature." The political right - and frankly, a large chunk of the center - has been horrified by the people straight-up celebrating Kirk's murder. Even if that's just a small percentage on the fringes, it doesn't seem like it when every algorithm on every social media platform is amplifying them. (There's no need to cite examples; we've all seen them.) And you can just imagine the suits in the corner offices at Disney panicking at the thought that Kimmel's unapologetic, defiant response would only make things worse. 

I'm sure someone brought it to their attention that Kimmel cried when Cecil the Lion got shot (cued to the 4:09 mark):

But when a 31 year old husband and father with 20 million followers took a fatal assassin's bullet, it was late night comedy monologue fodder on their network. That's a tough dynamic to justify when you're got advertisers who just want to run their commercials for car insurance after Dakota Johnson comes on to plug her latest project.

The conclusion we should all be able to agree on is that corporations are going to do what corporations are going to do. Which is take the path of least resistance. Especially when, like was the case with The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, there are multi-billion dollar mergers and acquisitions involved. 

In fact, the whole point of late night talk shows IS no resistance. The format has worked from the earliest days of the industry to give people safe, bland, comforting, happy celebrity talk before they go to bed. Almost immediately after Trump came down the golden escalator 10 years ago, all that changed. The comedy became political. The ratings have gone down a Double Black Diamond slope ever since. And now the No. 2 broadcast network show in that time slot has joined the No. 1 broadcast network show (like it or not, Fox News' Gutfeld! is crushing them all) in going off the air as a result. 

And as Charlie Kirk's supporters keep pointing out, there's a long list of their own who've been fired over expressing their opinions:

What all of this means to free speech is sort of up to all of us to decide on their own. But the reality is that Jimmy Kimmel is still free to say whatever he wants. Just not on Disney's nickel.