Following his talk show’s near cancellation last month, Jimmy Kimmel revealed how Jon Stewart nearly landed his hosting gig.
The Jimmy Kimmel Live! host recently said ABC “should definitely hire Jon” after the network passed on Stewart, in favor of Kimmel, for the late-night talk show that premiered back in January 2003.
“They wanted a traditional late-night talk show in that slot,” he explained on the Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast. “Jon and I have the same manager, James ‘Baby Doll’ Dixon, and James was about to close this deal for Jon to host the show.”
Kimmel added, “Lloyd [Braun, then ABC chairman] watched the tape and he was like, ‘I think this might be the guy.’ And he brought the tape to Bob Iger and Iger said, ‘Yeah, I think this might be the guy.’”
The 5x Emmy winner recalled it being “a very strange” situation for Dixon, who was “in the difficult position of having to tell Jon, ‘Uh, you’re not going to ABC, but Jimmy is going to ABC.’”
“That was a mistake by the way. They definitely should hire Jon,” added Kimmel. “If I’m in that position, there’s no question I hire John 100 times out of a 100.”
Kimmel recalled telling Iger that they took “quite a leap” in hiring him, and when asked why they chose him, the Disney CEO said, “‘Well, you were cheaper.’ And everybody laughed, but I knew he wasn’t kidding.”
“Somehow we wound up getting good ratings. I still don’t know how that was, but they were good enough to keep us on the air,” said Kimmel. “Even though I was causing trouble once every, like two and a half months, some major thing was happening. Something that came out of my mouth, you know, and caused a whole thing. It was just tumultuous.”
Last month, Kimmel returned to air following his brief suspension, driving 6.26 million viewers for ABC. The network previously announced the show was “preempted indefinitely,” which many criticized as an attack on free speech, following the FCC’s warning about the late-night host’s Charlie Kirk comments and Donald Trump’s celebration of the show’s suspension.
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