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Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night television show will return to the air less than a week after the Disney-owned ABC network suspended him “indefinitely” over remarks about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Disney on Monday said Jimmy Kimmel Live! would resume broadcasting on Tuesday. The company had suspended the show last week to “avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country”, it said, adding Kimmel’s comments in a monologue were “ill-timed and thus insensitive”.
Bob Iger, Disney chief executive, and Dana Walden, who oversees television and streaming for the group, made the decision to halt the show but continued to discuss its future with Kimmel in recent days.
“We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday,” the company said.
Disney had faced pushback for the decision to suspend Kimmel, with protesters picketing outside ABC studios and celebrities, including Tom Hanks, Jennifer Aniston and Meryl Streep, criticising the move. Hollywood unions condemned the suspension, with the screenwriters’s guild calling it “corporate cowardice”.
In his monologue last Monday, Kimmel accused Trump supporters of seeking to win political points from the Kirk shooting and “desperately trying to characterise this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them”.
Following the comments, Disney faced criticism from President Donald Trump and Brendan Carr, head of the Federal Communications Commission. “This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney,” Carr said last week. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Trump applauded the suspension of Kimmel, a longtime foil, and suggested that TV networks should lose their broadcast licenses for being “against” him.
“They give me only bad publicity, or press,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One last week. “I would think maybe their license should be taken away. It would be up to Brendan Carr.”
Stripping a broadcast license over political commentary is extremely unusual and possibly unconstitutional, said Bill Carter, an author and writer about the US television industry for more than 40 years.
“Threatening the license of the broadcast stations if they don’t do the administration’s bidding has never been done before,” Carter said. “If it’s not illegal, it seems to be at least unconstitutional in terms of the First Amendment. Stations only lose their licenses very rarely.”
The Kimmel suspension was the latest in a series of controversies involving media groups that have drawn Trump’s ire.
ABC and CBS both paid $16mn to settle lawsuits Trump had filed against them over news reports in the run-up to the presidential election. Trump also has launched multibillion-dollar suits against The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal for their reporting about him. (A judge struck down the suit against the Times last week for being too long and gave Trump’s legal team 28 days to refile it.)
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And in July, Paramount, owner of CBS, announced its decision to end The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in May 2026. Trump applauded the firing of a comedian he had labelled “no-talent Stephen Colbert”.
Kimmel has been a star at ABC for decades. He was host and producer of the hit game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? has emceed the Oscars four times. He is the longest-serving late-night host on the air with Jimmy Kimmel Live!
“[Kimmel] appears at every one of their upfront advertising conferences, their pitches to advertisers,” Carter said. “He’s very much the face of that network.”