The Great Network TV Affiliate Revolt Of 2025—i.e., two big corporations getting pissy about Jimmy Kimmel Live! completely of their own accord, and not because the FCC told them to—is now apparently over. Just a few hours after Sinclair Broadcast Group announced that it’d be returning Kimmel to its mass-owned airwaves on Friday night, its rival Nexstar played follow-the-leader and announced that it’d be doing the same. Our long, Guillermo-free national nightmare is now over.
Calling itself, with an apparently straight corporate face, a “local broadcaster,” gigantic conglomerate Nexstar said in a statement that it has “had discussions with executives at The Walt Disney Company and appreciate their constructive approach to addressing our concerns.” As with Sinclair’s concession-we’re-not-calling-a-concession, Nexstar’s statement didn’t suggest it had extracted any actual promises from Disney about controls it would impose on Kimmel or its other hosts, despite a lot of bellicose rhetoric in previous missives about how “Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time.”
As noted by Variety, Nexstar owns 32 ABC affiliates throughout the United States, and continued pre-empting Kimmel for several days after ABC and Disney decided to put him back on the air in the wake of controversy about a joke he made about “MAGA-land” reactions to the shooting of Charlie Kirk. Given the transparency with which FCC chair Brendan Carr seemed to direct the affiliates to protest, Kimmel’s suspension provoked a lot of backlash from folks who do not like seeing the government push around people making jokes in the public sphere. (Kimmel’s return, earlier this week, also prompted some of his highest ratings in a decade, numbers that Nexstar and Sinclair were both missing out on as they continued to run reruns of gameshows in the late-night show’s spot.)
