Of the many contemporaries, commentators, and critics who’ve weighed in, very vocally, on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel situation this week, one group has been notable for its silence: Disney itself, which issued a single, terse statement on its decision to yank Kimmel off the air on Wednesday—saying his show “will be preempted indefinitely,” which neatly sidestepped phrases like “fired,” “canceled,” or “oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck what do we doooooo“—and then slammed its mouth firmly shut. (As we, and several other folks watching the situation, noted earlier this week, when you can keep The View of all programs from weighing in on something like this, the information controls are being held pretty dang taut.) Which has left all of us on the outside of The Big Mouse forced to infer movement from those actions we can see—like the fact that ABC will continue paying Kimmel’s crew through at least the next week.
Reported by Deadline, the move suggests that Disney is still hoping it can get Jimmy Kimmel Live! back on the air. (Reconciliation being a lot easier with a couple of good-faith gestures, and a lack of “You bankrupted my people” hanging over negotiations.) That’s even as the company finds itself trapped between some pretty insurmountable walls. On one side, there’s the handful of companies that own huge swathes of ABC’s affiliate stations, who—prompted at the pretty clear direction of the FCC—have said they won’t run Kimmel anymore without “formal discussions” about the content of his show. And on the other, the many prominent voices from both inside and outside the company who are deeply unhappy at both his removal, and what it says about the Trump administration’s effective ability to silence media organizations for jokes it doesn’t like. (You know things are rough when you’ve triggered Bill Maher’s “broken clock still right twice a decade” instincts.) From out here, it’s not really obvious how you square those two particular circles, but keeping the paychecks flowing suggests that Disney execs are still clinging desperately to the hope that they can find a narrow path to success.
This is all firmly in “sources say” territory, but reports have been emerging throughout the week that ABC is trying to find a compromise with Kimmel, who was supposedly set to be pretty unapologetic on Wednesday night’s shuttered show, in response to conservative pushback against comments he made about Republicans trying to capitalize on Charlie Kirk’s murder. It’s not clear how conciliatory Kimmel would have to be to get Nexstar, Sinclair, and the White House off ABC’s already bent back—our general sense of How Bullies Work suggests there’s not really any feasible amount of groveling that would get the job done—but the one thing that might get him to try is the desire to keep his crew in their jobs. (There is at least one data point suggesting some of the affiliate groups might be realizing they’re wading into pretty murky waters here in terms of public opinion, meanwhile: Sinclair, which owns the largest conglomerated chunk of ABC affiliates in the United States, quietly walked back plans to run a Kirk tribute in Kimmel’s timeslot on Friday night. Celebrity Family Feud took the airwaves instead, while the special was shoved onto the company’s YouTube channel.)
