“Of course, I asked him, and I think it feels premature,” Kimmel tells Variety. “But I told him, ‘[A]nytime you want to host, it doesn’t matter if it’s the summer, I’ll gladly step aside.'” Colbert isn’t even really unemployed; he pretty immediately went to work on a new Lord Of The Rings. Still, the hole he left in the late night schedule helped Kimmel, he says: “The ratings are very strong, which we are very grateful to CBS for their wisdom… We were doing pretty well before that, but that really helped.”
He’s not just busting CBS’ chops, easy as that may be. According to Variety, June was Kimmel’s best-ever monthly audience, with an average of 3.15 million viewers per night. This fact—that people watch late night TV—is a drum Kimmel has been beating for a while, and does again here. “It’s silly how people go wild about a podcast that’s No. 5, and the numbers still don’t even compare to a television show,” he tells Variety. “There’s still a lot of people watching late night television, and I include the other shows in that. And there are still a lot of people looking at our shows on YouTube the next day, and there’s a lot of people who are interested in what we have to say. They may just may not necessarily be watching it on their TV, but it seems like a little bit of people are coming back to their old friend television.” And hopefully, Colbert comes back to visit his old friend late night before long, too.
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