Jimmy Kimmel is opening about the recent suspension of his talk show, Jimmy Kimmel Live.
The 57-year-old host made an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday night (September 30), and recalled the moment when he learned his show was being put on hold indefinitely.
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“It was about 3:00. We tape our show at 4:30. I’m in my office, typing away as I usually do. I get a phone call, it’s ABC. They say they want to talk to me. This is unusual,” he recounted of the afternoon (September 17). “As far as I knew, they didn’t even know I was doing a show previous to this, so I have like five people who work in my office with me, so the only private place to go is the bathroom.”
“So I go into the bathroom. And I’m on the phone with the ABC executives and they say, ‘Listen, we wanna take the temperature down. We’re concerned about what you’re gonna say tonight and we decided that the best route is to take the show off the air tonight,” Jimmy continued, as the audience booed.
“That’s what I said. I started booing,” he went on. “I said I don’t think that’s a good idea, and they said, ‘Well, we think it’s a good idea.’ And then there was a vote and I lost the vote. So I put my pants back on and I walked out to my office and I called in some of the executive producers, and there were about nine people in there, and I said, ‘They’re pulling the show off the air.’”
After leaving that meeting, Jimmy shared his wife told him he looked whiter than Jim Gaffigan, because he “thought that it’s over. I was like, I’m never coming back on the air.”
Jimmy added that the show being pulled so late in the day made things a bit more complicated as the audience was already in their seats as the show was about to start filming.
One of the schedule guests that night, chef Christian Petroni, had also already started cooking what he was presenting on the episode, and musician Howard Jones was also set to perform.
Jimmy shared that they taped Howard‘s performance anyway, despite the audience being sent home.
“The song he did do because we decided to tape it anyway, even though we sent the audience home, in front of our disappointed employees, was ‘Things Can Only Get Better.’ Which you could take two ways, right?” he joked.
He also recalled staying at the studio for a few more hours before going home, but when it came time to leave, his normal drive home was met by lots of paparazzi.
“I’m followed by 20 paparazzi cars, TMZ people jumping in front of me on the way home. We’re just trying to get to the house and we’re like, ‘Should we be going to our house?’ There are two helicopters following us home,” he recalled, joking, “I hadn’t had makeup on yet, so my bald spot was not painted in. This is something I did not want America to see.”
Jimmy shared that his family was “shaken” by it all, and even shared what it was like in the days following the news.
“It was like a DUI in L.A., three days in jail where I couldn’t say anything. I just had to sit quiet and make a lot of phone calls and take a lot of phone calls,” he said. “You [Colbert] were very kind to call me. … I did hear from literally everyone I have ever met.”
