Jimmy Kimmel is once again is sticking up for his pal Stephen Colbert.
Last month, CBS shockingly announced that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will be ending next year with the final episode ending in May 2026.
After facing major backlash, it was reported that the late-night show was losing the network $40 million a year.
In a new interview, Jimmy slammed those claims as “nonsensical.”
Keep reading to find out more…“I just want to say that the idea that Stephen Colbert’s show was losing $40 million a year is beyond nonsensical,” Jimmy told Variety. “These alleged insiders who supposedly analyze the budgets of the shows — I don’t know who they are, but I do know they don’t know what they’re talking about. They seem to only be focused on advertising revenue and have completely forgotten about affiliate fees, which number in the hundreds of millions — probably in total billions — and you must allocate a certain percentage of those fees to late-night shows.
He continued, “It really is surprising how little the media seems to know about how the media works. There’s just not a snowball’s chance in hell that that’s anywhere near accurate. Even that — that’s all you need to know. Suddenly he’s losing $40 million a year?”
“I will tell you, the first 10 years I did the show, they claimed we weren’t making any money,” Jimmy went on, “and we had five times as many viewers on ABC as we do immediately. Who knows what’s true? All I know is they keep paying us — and that’s kind of all you need to know.”
Also in the interview, Jimmy was asked about the narrative that late-night television is “dead.”
“Network television is declining. There’s no question about that,” Jimmy admitted. “But more people are watching late-night television than ever before — and I include Johnny Carson in that. People may find that shocking. When Carson was at his peak, he was getting around 9 million viewers a night. That’s huge. Of course, the lead-in shows were getting 30 and 40 million, which was a big part of it. But people are still watching late-night — just in different places.”
“Our monologues get between 2 and 5 million views, sometimes more, every night,” he explained. “Seth Meyers gets 2 million on YouTube alone. We’re not even talking about Instagram or the other platforms. The Daily Show — Jon Stewart on a Monday night will get 5 million views. Then you add in the TV ratings. So the idea that late-night is dead is simply untrue. People just aren’t watching it on network television in the numbers they used to — or live, for that matter. So the advertising model may be dying, but late-night television is the opposite.”
“If you look at streaming numbers — how many streaming shows get 10 million views a week? Twenty million? Very few,” Jimmy noted. “I think if you really look at how people are watching these shows, and the numbers, it’s right up there with the best shows on Netflix and Hulu. Yet in the media, you’d think this is a rotting corpse — which it most certainly is not. It just doesn’t add up. It’s a great storyline for the press, but it’s simply not true.”
He then shared why he wants people to vote for Stephen at the 2025 Emmys. (The Late Show is nominated for Outstanding Talk Series.)
“He’s not just a sweet man. He is very moral — he’s a very ethical person. He is the salt of the earth,” Jimmy raved. “He is a humble person and an extremely smart person. I hope that whatever he does next is even more powerful than what he’d been doing. And I think that’s very possible.”
If you missed it, Stephen Colbert joked about his next job after The Late Show ends.
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