Last night, Jimmy Kimmel was honored with a Peabody Award after a year on the ropes. “Making jokes about the president in America shouldn’t win you a prize. We have the right, guaranteed by the Constitution, to criticize and satirize our leaders,” he said at the ceremony, according to The Hollywood Reporter. But the people left to satirize our leaders, at least on late night television, are dwindling. Stephen Colbert’s show ended in May for dubious reasons, and Jon Stewart has openly worried about Paramount ending his show, too. And despite his position within the remaining late night ecosystem, Kimmel isn’t feeling especially confident about his show.
“I feel a little bit defeated by it,” Kimmel told Vulture after the finale of The Late Show. “In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m looking at my own future.” Outside of the continued complaints of the Trump administration, which already took Kimmel’s show off the air for a week last year, there are concrete contractual facts that do sound alarming. While Kimmel has typically extended his contract for three years at a time, it was only extended for one year when negotiations came last December. (“Everything is so tumultuous…That seemed to make sense. It’s definitely not how it’s gone in the past,” he says in the Vulture article.) That extension will keep him on the air until next May, but he also shares in the article that by May 2026, conversations for another extension hadn’t even started yet, and normally they would be in progress by now. “I don’t know what ABC is going to want to do,” he tells the magazine. “It’s an unusual position to be in, but I do still have a year left on my contract, and that’s what I agreed to.”
But political and corporate chicanery aside, it’s also unclear how much longer Kimmel even wants to do the show. The article suggests that he feels a responsibility to his employees, which may keep him working longer. Still, he has clearly thought about what an end to his show may look like. “It’s important to me to be responsible. I know I could go out in a blaze of glory and get a lot of applause for it, but it would be a very selfish thing to do,” he says.
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