Everyone Was Excited to Watch Jimmy Kimmel for Exactly One Week

Becoming a political martyr is really great for ratings. 

Nothing feels as precious as it does when you think you’re about to lose it, even Jimmy Kimmel’s very middle-of-the-road late-night show. When the FCC and Donald Trump issued (very public) mafia-style threats to Disney, the Jimmy Kimmel Live! host was removed from television in a stunning act of censorship, punished with indefinite suspension for the very mild comments he made about the murder of conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk. 

Kimmel became an overnight cause célèbre and the most high-profile face of Trump’s ever-escalating authoritarian regime. After several days off-air, he made a triumphant Tuesday night return, earning him the show’s highest ratings of all time and an absolute temper tantrum from Trump on Truth Social. 

The ratings stayed buoyed for about a week — longer than the single night I previously predicted — but, according to Mediaite, we’re already back to pre-martyr numbers. Kimmel’s Wednesday, October 1st show had 1.70 million viewers, dropping 74 percent from the 6.48 million viewers he had his first night back after being yanked from air. And that’s actually lower than his Q2 average ratings of 1.77 million viewers. 

This is a depressing reality about a number of things: 1) the number of Americans actually willing to stay up and watch live television at 11:30 p.m.; 2) the length of time Americans are willing to devote their time to any political cause; and 3) just how little allure Kimmel has with audiences. 

You get nearly seven million people to watch your television show, and your retention rate is below what your ratings already hit this year less than a week later? That’s not a good sign for Kimmel’s longevity. Even if Trump never mentions late-night television again, there’s no way network executives aren’t noticing that even as big of a boost as Kimmel received with his dramatic return, it didn’t leverage to even a slight longer-term gain.

Even though Kimmel did a pretty good job of balancing the seriousness of the his return with scathing digs at the administration that caused his departure, and that he still has higher approval ratings than Donald Trump, it’s clear the market for late-night viewers isn’t as big as the market for being victimized by the president. 

And that’s simply not a sustainable business model.