• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, September 19, 2025

Some of us are still in shock, and others in various stages of eye-rolling, about ABC's suddenly preempting "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" "indefinitely."

The pulling of the show has stirred up complicated, hot-button feelings and issues that sit at the intersection of politics, entertainment and law.

But meanwhile, while returning from England, President Trump said simply that because the networks “were 97% against me,” and always giving him “bad publicity,” that “maybe we should crack down on that.”

That’s an abrupt shift from Trump’s second inaugural address, when he announced last January, “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.”

This crackdown, about which the newly emboldened FCC chief Brendan Carr suggested “can be done the easy way, or the hard way,” clearly treads on First Amendment rights.

More specifically, in Kimmel's case, there are also the byzantine layers of corporate media overlords, including the monolith Disney, the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcasting, and the also conservative, merger-minded Nexstar, whose $6.2 billion deal to take over competitor Tegna requires FCC approval.

And that’s not even getting into what Kimmel actually said in his monologue about the horrifying murder of Charlie Kirk and the surrounding theories about his killer, ostensibly the reason for the dismissal.

Still, despite wall-to-wall coverage, one critical piece of business has received very little attention: What is ABC running to preempt the preemption?  

That slot-filler? According to reports, “Celebrity Family Feud.”

(Friday evening will be preempted by a Charlie Kirk Tribute.)

There’s no word on how long “Feud” will remain in ABC’s late-night stable, nor if Jimmy is out or gone.

At this writing, it seems to be a standoff.

On another note, old Dr. Freud would have a field-day analyzing “Feud” as the replacement.

First there’s the name, which seems a bit too on-the-nose (especially in the Celebrity version) to describe the internecine network battles.

Then there’s the seemingly lunkheaded idea of replacing Kimmel -- with his incisive, almost-live ability to contextualize the day’s madness into satire (at least in the monologue) -- with 60 minutes of a loud, canned, formulaic game show blazing with buzzers and lights.

At the very least, it’s a lot harder to fall asleep to.

That’s America! Or rather, to be kind, it feels like an eleventh-hour decision forced on stressed-out execs and attorneys. Was “The Apprentice” not available?  

Surely there’s a time and place (and built-in audience) for the “Feud” spinoff, and its 2025 premiere did well in the ratings. (They have since tapered off.) But that place is not late night.

Indeed, late-night ratings are way lower, across the board, than they were even five years ago.

And what to do with the more than 70-year-old, heavily staffed talk show institution is an issue facing the networks.

Still, Kimmel’s significant YouTube following generates decent revenue for ABC, and the show's topical clips provide amusing content, animating social media, newspapers and websites.

Whereas “Feud” provides a certain crowd-pleasing, if queasy and less high-minded, comfort -- and it can be fun.

Yes, it has a certain kitsch appeal. Steve Harvey’s mustache, velour suits, abject love for the teams and the survey questions provides old-timey entertainment. It’s also a set-up to provoke dumb answers and the inevitable awkwardness when an answer makes the host double over laughing, leaning into one family or another.

And speaking of dumb, this celebrity/game show hybrid is built on two levels of it.

First, there’s the foundational “survey said” game board portion. That part come from the professional polling firm, Applied Research-West, which conducts phone surveys using random dialing. Respondents answer questions written and compiled by the game show staff, not knowing that their answers are for “Family Feud.”

Then the data is compiled to find the most popular replies from 100 respondents. This system is suspect, since contestants, rather than being creative and smart, must vie to match the crowd-sourced answers on the board, some of which are flat-out wrong.  

A famous stinker, back in the days of touchy-feely host Richard Dawson, in response to "Name something associated with Tom Sawyer," was “dog.”  

Dawson had to acknowledge that there's no dog in the novel -- but there was one on the board, because that's what the survey said.

Then there are the bawdier questions, created to embarrass the contestants into some off-color or creepy, nervous answer. Or to double down on dumb.

Like, “Name a famous or fictional Willy.”

The answer? “Willy the Pooh.”

At the same time, though, like a person, “Family Feud” contains multitudes, and some surprises.

The series made history in 2025 with the first all-transgender team, as noted by Collider, providing visibility for the transgender community. 

So perhaps what even a seemingly lame replacement like “Celebrity Family Feud” shows us is that networks and stations can’t stamp out or erase the reality of modern times, with its messy and discomfiting updates and changes.

They reflect something contemporary and true, a reality not of the reality-show kind.