Jon Stewart came closer than most people know to landing the ABC late-night gig that ultimately went to Jimmy Kimmel.
During an interview taped before Kimmel was suspended from the network following threats from the Trump administration, Kimmel told Ted Danson on his Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast that ABC was “almost about to hire Jon Stewart” to replace Bill Maher in 2002. At the time, Stewart was about three years into his run as host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show.
“They wanted a traditional late-night talk show in that slot,” Kimmel said. “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.”
JON STEWART, JIMMY KIMMEL Disney/Randy Holmes
ABC executive Michael Davies intervened, however, and suggested that Lloyd Braun, the company’s chairman at the time, take a look at Kimmel’s tape.
“Lloyd 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.’” Kimmel added, “It was a very strange thing because” he and Stewart’s shared manager 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,” Kimmel quipped. “They definitely should hire Jon. If I’m in that position, there’s no question I hire John 100 times out of a 100.”
Kimmel was shocked to have landed the gig back then, telling the New York Times in 2002, “I think the best word to describe what I felt when they offered me the job is ‘bewildered.’ I am not surprised that I’ve been successful in television. I was surprised to get the job at ABC.’”
He told Danson that he later asked Iger why he was chosen over Stewart. “I said, ‘What was it, like why—this is quite a leap that you guys made. I was on The Man Show, I was doing football picks on Fox NFL Sunday—what was it?’ He goes, ‘Well, you were cheaper.’ And everybody laughed, but I knew he wasn’t kidding.”
Jimmy Kimmel Live debuted in 2003, and Kimmel recalled the early days were rough. “I think my vision of hell is being forced to watch my first year of shows, because it is just as painful as anything could get for me. It took us a long time to figure it out and we’re very fortunate to get a long time to figure it out.”
“Somehow we wound up getting good ratings,” he continued. “I still don’t know how that was, but they were good enough to keep us on the air, 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.”
Kimmel was once again in hot water just days after his conversation with Danson, when his show was periodically taken off the air after threats from Trump’s FCC Chair, which greatly pleased Kimmel’s nemesis Donald Trump. Stewart skewered the president over his late-night TV crackdown, which also helped precipitate Stephen Colbert’s Late Show cancellation.
Stewart joked on his Daily Show during Kimmel’s suspension, “Some naysayers may argue that this administration’s speech concerns are merely a cynical ploy, a thin gruel of a ruse, a smokescreen to obscure an unprecedented consolidation of power and unitary intimidation, principle-less and coldly antithetical to any experiment in a constitutional republic governance,” he also quipped. “Some people would say that… Not me, though. I think it’s great.”
The host also stopped by Kimmel’s show earlier this month for a sketch that took more thinly-veiled shots at the Trump administration’s war on late night. Dressed as a Grubhub driver, Stewart told Kimmel during his monologue, “In case you haven’t heard the news: late-night talk show host, the job security’s not really there right now.”
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