Last month, ABC executives told Jimmy Kimmel that his late-night show would be taken off the air. The audience was already in the studio: a guest chef had started cooking, a musical guest was warming up the room, and the host himself remained in the bathroom, waiting for a call.

“It was around 3:00; our show is being taped at 4:30,” Kimmel told Stephen Colbert on The Late Show on Tuesday. “I was in my office, typing, as usual. They called me. It’s ABC. They said they wanted to talk to me. It’s strange: as far as I understood, they didn’t even know I was doing a show until then.”

– Jimmy Kimmel, The Late Show

The show’s writers gathered in the office: five writers were nearby, and the only private place where he could take the call was the bathroom.

“So I went to the bathroom and spoke on the phone with ABC executives. And they say: ‘Listen, we want to dial down the tension. We’re concerned about what you’ll say tonight, and we’ve decided that the best path is to pull the show off the air.’”

– Jimmy Kimmel, The Late Show

The audience booed the star, and Kimmel quipped: “Oh, exactly what I said: I started booing.”

“I said: ‘I don’t think this is a good idea,’ and they replied: ‘Well, we think it’s a good idea.’ Then a vote took place, and I lost the vote.”

– Jimmy Kimmel, The Late Show

After that, the head of production sat down with him in the office, and Kimmel’s face suddenly went pale at the news.

“I thought: here it is. It’s over. I thought I’d never go back on the air,” he recalled later in the conversation.

The show was suspended in mid-September after a sharp monologue mentioning the suspects in the murder of Charlie Kirk and the political reaction to the incident. A few days later, FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened to revoke ABC’s licenses in a conservative podcast. Nexstar – the network of stations that carries “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in about twenty markets – also announced that it would not have the show on the air. Another affiliated network, Sinclair, did the same. And just a few hours later, Kimmel picked up the phone in the ABC executives’ office.

The following Tuesday, Kimmel returned to the air with an emotional monologue – and record-breaking ratings.

“I was very nervous to do this right, because there was nothing in the teleprompter to read. I spoke off the cuff,” – said Colbert when recalling that moment. “They started: ‘Come on, Stephen, you can do this,’ because I always stumble over those words. And when it came to the sentence that explains what’s happening, they didn’t laugh.”

– Stephen Colbert

While the network owner called the cancellation purely a business decision, many media critics – and Kimmel himself – doubted that motivation and suspected political motives related to the reaction to Paramount’s merger with Skydance. Both hosts – Colbert and Kimmel – have long been known for their sharp stance toward President Donald Trump, a topic that remained widely discussed in the media and among viewers.

Attention was also drawn to Meyers’ appearance in the studio and viewers’ reactions on social media – an Instagram post showed a photo of the three hosts with the caption “Hi Donald!”

Kimmel’s return to the air became one of the most powerful moments of that time – with high ratings and an emotional undertone that underscored the significance of his show in the cultural landscape.