Jimmy Kimmel admitted in a new interview that he feels “a little bit defeated” by the conclusion of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” last month, revealing, “I feel like I’m looking at my own future.”
In an interview published Monday by Vulture, Kimmel compared watching Colbert’s long-running late night series end, following its cancellation by CBS last year, to the Billy Joel song “Allentown,” in which the New York singer croons: “Well, we’re living here in Allentown / And they’re closing all the factories down.”
The ABC host also pushed back against CBS’s insistence that it cancelled Colbert’s show because of “purely financial” reasons. To back himself up, Kimmel pointed to reports that CBS had encouraged Colbert to sign a five-year contract extension in 2023 instead of the three-year deal the host ultimately agreed to.
“Am I to believe that over the course of those two years, they suddenly started losing $40 million a year?” he asked. “These are just made-up numbers.”
“There are far more people watching late night TV than there ever were, if you look at the number of views me and my colleagues get online every day and add in our linear-television ratings,” Kimmel further argued, insisting that it is “silly” to call the longtime television tradition a dying art form. “We’re not just dying of natural causes. We’re being poisoned.”
In December 2025, Kimmel signed a one-year contract extension with Disney that will take “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” through May 2027. The extension was signed just months after he was briefly suspended by the company over intense calls for his firing from President Trump. Regarding his limited, one-year extension, Kimmel told Vulture, “Everything is so tumultuous. That seemed to make sense. It’s definitely not how it’s gone in the past.”
“I don’t know what ABC is going to want to do,” he added. “It’s an unusual position to be in, but I do still have a year left on my contract, and that’s what I agreed to.” The host also admitted that he has begun to think about how he would like “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” which has been on the air since Jan. 2003, to ultimately end.
“It’s important to me to be responsible. I know I could go out in a blaze of glory and get a lot of applause for it, but it would be a very selfish thing to do,” Kimmel said. “Six years ago, I told them I thought I was done when Biden was president.”
His longtime producer, Erin Irwin, told Vulture, “He’s been talking about leaving for a while.” While she would like to see the series go through the 2028 election, Irwin admitted, “I don’t know if Jimmy can do it for that long. He’s tired.”
“Professionally, I have no idea what I’m going to do after this,” Kimmel himself said, echoing similar comments made by Colbert in the months leading up to his show’s conclusion on CBS. “Freedom is what I want more than anything … I want to be able to go fishing because the fishing’s good.”
