Jimmy Kimmel has had a turbulent two years — a headline-grabbing suspension, a feud with the president, and the kind of cultural firestorms that most hosts would consider career-threatening. The audience, it turns out, has been watching all of it. ABC announced on September 29 that the 2025–2026 season of Jimmy Kimmel Live! was its most-watched in eight years, dating back to the 2017–2018 season — and the newly started 2026–2027 season has opened in the No. 1 spot across all of late night.
The numbers mark a clear changing of the guard. With The Late Show with Stephen Colbert having bowed out in May, Kimmel has ascended to the top of the late-night ratings chart — a position Colbert's show held for years — and the controversies that once threatened the program appear to have expanded its audience instead.
The Season That Broke the Slump
According to ABC's announcement, Kimmel averaged two million total viewers each week across the 2025–2026 season. The season finished with momentum: in the final week of the 2025–2026 season, the show ranked No. 1 in both total viewers (2.34 million) and among adults 18–49, the demographic advertisers prize most.
The new season has started even stronger. Kimmel drew 2.29 million viewers in its first week of the fall 2026 television season, giving it the No. 1 spot across all of late night in its 11:35 p.m. time slot. ABC also noted that last season's Kimmel scored No. 1 among viewers 18–49 — a particularly meaningful metric in a late-night landscape where the advertiser-coveted demo has been fragmenting for years.
The figures represent a genuine reversal of fortune. Late-night television has spent the better part of a decade shedding viewers to streaming, YouTube clips, and changing sleep habits. For a network talk show to post its best season in eight years in 2026 is, by the standards of the format, a remarkable achievement.
The Colbert Vacuum
Kimmel's rise cannot be separated from the departure of his biggest rival. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert ended in May 2026, closing out a run in which it had been the dominant force in late night. In 2026, the former CBS show was averaging 2.96 million viewers per episode including delayed viewing — comfortably ahead of the pack.
Its exit left a vacuum, and Kimmel has filled it. A report by TheWrap noted that in the month after Colbert's show ended, Jimmy Kimmel Live! viewers rose to their highest number in eight years, averaging 2.02 million — a 24 percent increase over the previous year's viewership, with a 29 percent jump in the 18–49 demographic. That put Kimmel ahead of NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Meyers.
The audience migration makes intuitive sense. Like Colbert, Kimmel has been at heated odds with President Donald Trump and his allies, and viewers who tuned in for Colbert's politically charged comedy appear to have found a natural home with Kimmel. His competitors saw smaller bumps — Fallon gained 19 percent year-over-year in the first week Colbert was off the air, while Meyers rose a more modest 7 percent — but Kimmel captured the lion's share.
The Suspension That Backfired
The ratings surge is inseparable from the most dramatic episode in the show's history. In September 2025, ABC and parent company Disney chose to "indefinitely" preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live! following comments Kimmel made about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The comments angered many on the right and drew threats from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, launching a weeklong media frenzy over free speech and the Trump administration's posture toward its critics.
Disney lifted the suspension less than a week later, and Kimmel's return episode became a television event. When he returned to the airwaves, 6.26 million total viewers tuned in on broadcast alone — despite dozens of local ABC affiliate stations owned by Nexstar and Sinclair preempting the episode, blocking it from roughly 23 percent of U.S. TV households. ABC touted the episode's 0.87 rating as the series' highest in more than a decade, dating back to March 12, 2015. The show's emotional monologue from that night went on to earn more than 26 million views across YouTube and social media.
The weeks that followed confirmed it was not a one-night curiosity. When Kimmel took the show to Brooklyn shortly after his return, the episodes averaged 2.2 million viewers — up 35 percent compared with the show's previous Brooklyn visit in 2022, and ahead of both Colbert and Fallon for the week. The suspension, intended by its instigators as a punishment, functioned as the most effective promotion in the show's history.
Controversy as Programming
Kimmel's year has been a case study in how controversy functions in the modern attention economy. Beyond the suspension, he has feuded publicly with President Trump, generated headlines with stunts like asking New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to send cheeky text messages, and turned his monologues into must-watch cultural moments.
There is a cynical reading — that outrage is now a programming strategy — and a more straightforward one: that in a fragmented media environment, the hosts who say something that matters, or at least something that provokes, are the ones audiences seek out. Kimmel's numbers suggest the straightforward reading has merit. Viewers did not tune in despite the controversies; the ratings trajectory suggests they tuned in because the show felt consequential.
That dynamic carries risks. Advertisers remain skittish about controversy, and the political polarization that has boosted Kimmel's ratings could just as easily alienate segments of the audience. But ABC's announcement suggests the network has made its calculation: a No. 1 late-night show, first in total viewers and first in the demo, is worth whatever headaches come with it.
What It Means for Late Night
Kimmel's ascendancy arrives at an inflection point for the format. With Colbert gone, the late-night hierarchy that defined the past decade has been scrambled. Fallon and Meyers remain, but neither has matched Kimmel's momentum. The question now is whether Kimmel can hold the crown — or whether the audience that arrived for the drama will drift away once the news cycle moves on.
The early signs are encouraging for ABC. The 2.29 million viewers in the first week of the new season suggest the audience is sticking around, and the No. 1 finishes in both total viewers and the 18–49 demo give the network a clean story to sell to advertisers heading into the heart of the fall season.
For the broader television business, the lesson is a familiar one delivered in unfamiliar packaging: in an era of infinite choice, appointment viewing still exists — it just needs a reason. For eight years, Jimmy Kimmel Live! could not find enough of those reasons. In the past year, they arrived all at once, and two million viewers a week decided to stay up for them.
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