Jimmy Kimmel is defending fellow late-night host Stephen Colbert from “nonsensical” claims that his Late Show was costing CBS millions annually.
Following CBS’s controversial decision to axe The Late Show, reports emerged that the program allegedly lost the network $40 million each year.
However, Kimmel isn’t buying those findings, telling Variety that they are “beyond nonsensical.”
“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,” the Jimmy Kimmel Live! host argued.
“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. It really is surprising how little the media seems to know about how the media works,” he said.
“There’s just not a snowball’s chance in hell that that’s anywhere near accurate,” Kimmel declared. “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 — and we had five times as many viewers on ABC as we do now. Who knows what’s true? All I know is they keep paying us — and that’s kind of all you need to know.”
Last month, CBS announced it would be doing away with its long-running Late Night franchise, insisting the move was a purely “financial decision.”
While others, including Colbert’s Late Night predecessor David Letterman, have voiced skepticism toward CBS’s reasoning, former late-night host Samantha Bee has disagreed.
“These legacy shows are haemorrhaging money with no real end to that — in sight, people are just not tuning in,” Bee said on a July 30 appearance on the Breaking Bread with Tom Papa podcast.
Despite finding the cancellation “awful,” she said: “People are literally on their phones all the time for one thing, so they actually don’t necessarily need a recap of the day’s events. They’re very well-versed in what has happened.”
Asked his opinion about the supposed death of late-night television, Kimmel hit back, asserting that even though, without question, “network television is declining,” more people are “watching late-night television than ever before.”
“People are still watching late-night — just in different places,” he said, listing late-night’s significant reach on Instagram and YouTube.
“So the idea that late-night is dead is simply untrue,” Kimmel added. “People just aren’t watching it on network television in the numbers they used to — or live, for that matter.”
He continued: “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.
“I think if you really look at how people are watching these shows, and the numbers, it’s right up there with the top 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.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Kimmel said he will be casting his vote for Colbert to win the Emmy for Outstanding Talk Series at the September award ceremony.
“It seems like voting for Stephen is the least we could do at this point, and I think it will be a nice statement if he does win,” he said. “Obviously, awards don’t mean much, but every once in a while they do, and in this case, I think it will. So I fully expect Stephen to win the Emmy as I think people are very, very upset about what happened to him and his show.”
Praising Colbert’s character, Kimmel said: “He’s not just a sweet man. He is very moral — he’s a very ethical person. He is the salt of the earth. 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.”
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