Who is more unglued in
the battle between Jimmy Kimmel and President Trump?
The TV Blog believes that both of these combatants have gone too far -- Kimmel with his tiresome,
all-Trump, all-the-time monologues, and Trump with his petulant laser focus on the utterings of late-night comedians and worse, his weaponizing of the FCC to threaten their right to free
speech.
The latter is beyond the pale -- so much so that it hardly needs to be spelled out.
No matter how much a President detests attacks
from comedians and satirists, none to my knowledge have ever activated a federal agency to harass and threaten any of them.
I remember reading that Abraham Lincoln
was one of the most attacked presidents in American history when it came to the newspaper and magazine media of the Civil War era, with cartoonists famously depicting him as an ape, or worse. Lincoln
probably reacted with one of his wry sayings and then let it go.
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But not Trump. He thinks nothing of threatening TV companies he doesn’t like with the
loss of assets worth billions -- their TV stations. It goes without saying, but this tactic is odious.
If he were to willy-nilly direct his FCC to deny
Disney its broadcast licenses, then for all intents and purposes it would amount to an unprecedented seizure of assets of an American company by an American president.
And because of
what? Jimmy Kimmel?
When it comes to TV shows and in this case, a wayward TV personality, the TV Blog is a big believer in the free marketplace.
This principle has decided the fates of TV shows and TV personalities since the dawn of television. Disney does not need Donald Trump to cancel “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
Disney’s roots in television go back to 1950. The company is in a better position than Trump to know when
continuing the “Kimmel” show ceases to make economic sense.
The fact is, we are likely nearing that point anyway, with or without Trump’s
threats and fulminations.
Kimmel’s nightly obsession with Trump is staler than week-old bread. Without belaboring the point already made previously in
a TV Blog earlier this week, Kimmel seems to have lost whatever skills he once had for delivering lighthearted, creative comedy on weeknights following local news.
By 11:35 p.m., many of us have had our fill of strife, divisive politics and social-media temper tantrums.
Watching one of our late-night stars
have one of those tantrums on his TV show night after night is not the way many of us want to spend the last hour of our day before retiring for the night.
Eventually, Disney will pull the plug on Kimmel, just like Paramount/CBS did with Stephen Colbert.
Disney’s eventual Kimmel decision will be a business decision
based primarily on profits vs. costs.
It might also be based on a growing consensus at Disney that the host of its
only late-night entertainment show is losing his mind -- not unlike President Trump, when you stop and think about it.