Late Night Television

[dx23]

“The MAGA Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said.

“In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving,” he added.

What about that is dumb?

It's dumb because the evidence clearly shows that the shooter isn't MAGA or a Groyper.

Where did Kimmel say that the shooter was MAGA or Groyper? People in the right loves to move the goal post but apparently can't fucking read verbatim. And by the way, I'm taking any information provided by the current administration with a grain of salt. Between the anti-vaxxers in the FDA, the leader of Project 2025 inside the FCC, a lying sack of shit as the FBI director and a pair of lying sacks of shit as President and VP, it's very hard to take any information they give about anything as real.

In other news, Jon Stewart is hosting the Daily Show tonight (Desi Lydic was scheduled to host and Jon had the week off). I imagine that he's going to come and defend Kimmel but I wonder if he should go scorched earth (as he should) or is going to give us another one of those "both sides" bullshit he's given people in the past. I'm certainly more interested in what John Oliver says as he basically has more of a fuck everyone type of crew. Someone asked about Bill Maher and he'll defend Kimmel while at the same time pandering to the right like he's done over the past 25 years.

There's a rumor floating around too that Kimmel is being pushed out to give Stephen A Smith a prime time platform on ABC. He is the perfect right wing Greg Gutfeld type of asshole that Disney has on their roster now and one, if not the one, highest paid personalities in the company.

[Beloved Aunt]

give Stephen A Smith a prime time platform on ABC. He is the perfect right wing Greg Gutfeld type of asshole

I dunno, did you see what Gutfeld did today? Him and Jessica Tarlov were arguing about the Charlie Kirk killing, whether the right or left is more guilty of inciting political violence bla bla, and he started shrieking at her, some pretty foul, demented, fascistic bullshit. Gutfeld is far right, I don't think Stephen A. Smith is quite the same thing.

[Kracker]

“The MAGA Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said.

“In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving,” he added.

What about that is dumb?

It's dumb because the evidence clearly shows that the shooter isn't MAGA or a Groyper.

But he didn’t even say that. He said MAGA were desperately trying to characterize the shooter as anyone but them. Which is true. Whether he’s MAGA or not was irrelevant to that statement. Since every side is pretty much doing the same thing. And a report says the execs didn’t believe anything Kimmel said was out of line but they were responding to direct threats from Trump’s FCC if they didn’t do anything about Kimmel. It’s extremely obvious that he wasn’t fired because the comment but at the behest of the government and this is an another egregious violation of free speech. Kimmel’s lawyers should have plenty to eat on this one.

[swo17]

Probably old news to some but I just learned that the current head of the FCC, Brendan Carr, wrote the FCC section of Project 2025

[dx23]

Watching the Daily Show for the first time this year and it’s fucking unbelievable that it took the Kimmel suspension for Jon Stewart to finally understand that we are under a dictatorship. This even after a Nobel Peace Laureate told him back in 2016 that this was going to happen and told him just last March that we were under a disaster. How fucking dense is Stewart? How fucking dense are white people in this country? We’ve been screaming from the top of our lungs that this was going to happen and it took the Kimmel suspension for everyone to start taking this shit seriously. People make fun saying that MAGA voters fell for Trump stupidity of the Epstein Files, “they are going to deport them not me”, “the liberals are going to lose their jobs, not us who supported Trump”, but white democrats/liberals aren’t that far behind in being so gullible to think that unwritten rules and “structural guardrails” in the system were going to protect them.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[bearcuborg]

Meh, I watch classic Carson on Antenna TV. It’s 1983 in my home every night. Hi-yo!

[Toland's Mitchell]

The only two things that are going to work now are cancelling your legacy media subscriptions for Disney+, ABC, ESPN, Amazon, Paramount+ etc...

Cancelled my Disney+ Hulu bundle today.

As for this whole Kimmel controversy, it's completely transparent what the FCC is doing here. It is true late-night talk shows on broadcast networks are becoming less profitable, which serves as an excuse to fall back on when Trump's FCC wants to silence dissent against the MAGA agenda. I think both factors are contributing to the end of Colbert and Kimmel. Colbert merely criticized Paramount's settlement in Trump's 60 Minutes lawsuit, and CBS decided not to renew his show two days later. That sounds fishy to me. Flash forward to the events of the last two days. FCC Chair Brendan Carr made threatening remarks to ABC over Kimmel, and they decide to pull the plug on him within hours. Maybe ABC decided Kimmel Live wasn't worth saving for financial reasons, and it was easier to kowtow to Carr than stand up for Kimmel. Cowardice, indeed. Kimmel's comment wasn't even that bad, but because it pissed off Brendan Carr, Carr abused his power to suppress free speech, and got his way. This is a terrible precedent to set. It sends a message to other talk show hosts that can't say anything remotely critical of the MAGA crowd (again, Kimmel's joke wasn't even that bad). Furthermore, Carr may be feeling he can now go after anyone on broadcast TV who makes an anti-MAGA remark. At least late night talk shows on cable and streaming are protected from FCC regulation (for now?).

[tenia]

Probably old news to some but I just learned that the current head of the FCC, Brendan Carr, wrote the FCC section of Project 2025

And the podcast he went to say Kimmel would probably get sanctioned is an alt-right one. It's all very convenient.

[Matt]

Re: Jon Stewart: he's always been a little bit out of touch, even in his MTV days. His patented brand of Gen-X eye-rolling, deep-sighing, superior-tone-taking mockery of political figures on "The Daily Show" was maybe fun when George W. Bush was in office and—even though things like the Patriot Act and the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq were being rammed through Congress—we weren't in fear of the country falling apart. And then he could mock Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin and Fox News and the Tea Party and all the foot-stamping opposition to Obama. This seeped into "real" news programs like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and became sort of the default liberal tone that continues to this day on social media (and probably on TV as well—don't know, don't watch). I eventually had to stop watching "The Daily Show" around 2007, but continued watching "The Colbert Report" because his satire was really sharp and equal-opportunity. But Stewart and Colbert both really lost the plot with that idiotic Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in 2010.

Then Trump came along and this attitude continued and everyone thought it was funny (and somehow still thinks it's funny) to mock him and call him Drumpf and Cheetolini and not really pay attention to what's actually happening and how serious things really are now. But Jon Stewart still somehow thinks it's 2000 and politics is all just a zany circus we can watch while munching popcorn and not really be affected by. Now that his friends are losing their jobs because of jokes, is he finally waking up? Maybe he knows he might be next now that the Ellisons own his network.

[domino harvey]

Interesting reading. The problem is that Gen Z is way, way more irony poisoned than millennial fans of the Daily Show. And they interact with the world in a way that prioritizes this detachment over any kind of consistency (moral, political, or otherwise). Perhaps these kind of things carrying over into the online space fed into this being de rigueur for the next generation, but there are bigger holistic problems afoot than ineffectual liberalism (redundant)

[Never Cursed]

The problem is that Gen Z is way, way more irony poisoned than millennial fans of the Daily Show. And they interact with the world in a way that prioritizes this detachment over any kind of consistency (moral, political, or otherwise).

Not to go OT or whatever, but this does not reflect the way that I've interacted with people my age at all. Political apathy and a sarcastic or detached approach to political events or contestations are not a stereotype unique to Gen Z ("Gen X is just a bunch of slackers who don't care about anything and can't get jobs," "Millennials want everything handed to them/care more about their anxieties and feelings than what's going on") and are examples thereof that I find uniquely inapplicable to the highly and sincerely politically motivated Gen Zers. I think the real question with them (us, I guess) is the apathy they feel towards the boundaries of the two American parties established before 2016 - hence the loyal support of conservative zoomers for Trump and the engagement of much of the left wing of the group in anti-capitalist, anti-mainstream-Democrat political engagement (Palestine, the Sanders left). One might object to some or all of this, but where do you find moral or political inconsistency here?

[domino harvey]

We are both self-selecting our sample species (someone of any generation who has made their perceived political righteousness part of their identity is prob not going to exhibit this tendency, but this is not a representative group), which is going to lead to different readings of the overall genus here

[Never Cursed]

Okay, sure. Why make any claims about what a generation is or does, then?

[Mr Sausage]

I’m around domino’s age, but my experience is that both of you are right. Gen Z is characterized on the one hand by a learned helplessness towards institutions and authorities that gets expressed as apathy and distance, shading even into millenarist desires for everything to crumble and be swept away as the only meaningful social change. See: voters who saw both political parties as the same, but voted Trump because his chaos was attractive.

On the other hand Gen Z is characterized by a political and social sincerity the previous generations were more suspicious of. Gen X’ers and Millenials these days either mock it, attempt to join in out of guilt, or in the case of political activists, attempt to galvanize it (hence so many on the right tour college campuses). This sincerity has a lot of influence in online spaces.

These are generalizations and reductive, but they are qualities I’ve noticed and I think explains why you two have come to two different but fair conclusions about the group.

[Never Cursed]

I’m around domino’s age, but my experience is that both of you are right. Gen Z is characterized on the one hand by a learned helplessness towards institutions and authorities that gets expressed as apathy and distance, shading even into millenarist desires for everything to crumble and be swept away as the only meaningful social change. See: voters who saw both political parties as the same, but voted Trump because his chaos was attractive.

This is a fair reading (even if I have not experienced the "learned helplessness" you describe), but I guess what I'm saying that the "millenarist desires" for sweeping creative destruction should be understood as a contextual political attitude rather than as, like, Joker-esque flailing at the world. I think we have an actual corpus of nihilistic violence that we can very easily analyze as such in the form of mass and school shootings, most of which have 0 political valence intended by the shooters, but which pre-date Gen Z by quite some time and are strong contributors to political engagement in Gen Z. For better or worse, if you voted Trump because you wanted the whole American system to fall apart, you have very strong views on the current political and social order. I would classify these opinions as neither apathy (because it's a stand being taken) nor distance (it isn't distanced) nor learned helplessness (if voting is helpless, why vote?). Look no further for an example than Thomas Crooks, the guy who shot Trump in the ear, a Gen Z-er with anti-imperialist, racist, and antisemitic views that were completely incoherent when analyzed through party polarity but entirely legible as anti-systemic fury.

[Mr Sausage]

Not apathy and distance in absolute terms, but apathy and distance towards traditional social and political institutions, and especially towards traditional elites. The millenarist tendency is not nihilistic but a desire to see the whole mess cleared away so there can be a possibility for something new (what that is often remains vague), rather than work within traditional systems to foster change. Elites can get caught up in this, often by mistaking it for more traditional forms of revolution they’re familiar with. See: Slavoj Žižek endorsing Trump. Contrast this with more sincere Gen Zers who invest in traditional political spheres, right or left.

But, again, I’m generalizing, and these are only tendencies, not essentials. Lotta people in this age bracket won’t fit this binary.

[flyonthewall2983]

Apropos of nothing really important to discuss here, but I have always thought of ABC as the lamest of the major networks.

[Matt]

Aside from the politics, I can see why networks are giving up on late night shows: almost nobody under 50 is watching them. Colbert is the top-rated show, averaging 2.42 million viewers in the second quarter of 2025. But only 219,000 of those were between the ages of 18-49. Kimmel had 220,000 and Fallon 157,000. Fallon dropped 29% in that demographic in one year. So of course he's the last one standing.

[FrauBlucher]

This is absolutely true. Another relic from old television with no future is on its way out

[Finch]

Kimmel would be much better off launching a new online platform where he can reach a bigger audience and generate more revenue compared to what he was getting at ABC.

[Drucker]

Selfishly it sure seems so. I was frequently seeing Conan clips of his podcast when I was active on social media. I have always liked Kimmel a great deal, even on The Man Show (especially on The Man Show?) Good for him, sad for us.

[domino harvey]

Kimmel will return to air on Thursday

[Kracker]

Kimmel will return to air on Thursday

Tomorrow, Tuesday actually

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/entertai ... -returning


Wonder what effects Kimmel’s unprecedented brief hiatus will have, the Stalingrad of Trump’s war on late night prehaps

[okcmaxk]

After saying nothing last week, Whoopi & Company want you to know "no one silences us" (and "took a breath to see if Jimmy was going to say anything about it first," sure!)

[Orlac]

Kimmel will return to air on Thursday

Damn and I was going to ransom my Disney+ subscription hoping they'd release the Star Wars OT AND Song of the South in 4k!