Disney brings back Jimmy Kimmel after suspension over Charlie Kirk comments

Jimmy Kimmel will return to television on Tuesday, nearly one week after Disney owned ABC took his long running late night talk show, Jimmy Kimmel Li...

Jimmy Kimmel will return to television on Tuesday, nearly one week after Disney-owned ABC took his long-running late-night talk show, "Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” off the air under pressure from the Trump administration, station owners and conservative critics over comments he made after the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

"Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country,” The Walt Disney Co. wrote in a statement Monday. "It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. 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.”

Kimmel used his monologue Sept. 15 to suggest Kirk’s accused killer was part of "the MAGA gang” rather than a liberal, and suggested Trump was feigning grief over the killing to "score political points.” Kimmel had previously condemned the shooting and those who celebrated it. His jokes leading up to his suspension did not target Kirk but rather Republicans whom Kimmel accused of exploiting the death, including Trump’s son Eric ("This poor guy might need someone to adopt him,” Kimmel said), Vice President JD Vance (and "his little mascara-stained finger”), and FBI Director Kash Patel, who was heard repeatedly sniffing into a microphone in Kimmel’s clip montage.

The monologue was standard fare for Kimmel. And the right-wing backlash to it did not seem especially remarkable until Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, appeared on a conservative podcast Wednesday and linked Kimmel to "a very concerted effort to try to lie to the American people about” the politics of Kirk’s killer.