• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, 5 hours ago

The live, linear TV business -- or the near-live linear entertainment -- continues to find ways to survive, for entertainment life.

But realistically, for anything other than big-time sports programming or news, this can be a problem.

This includes late-night entertainment talk shows -- NBC’s “Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon” and now ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

Disney executives are frank about the tough market conditions -- which took down CBS’ “Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” according to the senior executives at the network, earlier this year.

The decision by the network came at the same time Colbert talked up a July 2025 monologue with its comedy directed at the Paramount Global executives' decision to pay a $16 million settlement to Donald Trump. This was all to get a deal completed for the sale of the company to Skydance Media.

But last week Dana Walden, president/chief creative officer at Walt Disney, added more weight to the economic problems of late-night TV, and for "Kimmel."

“The truth is, it’s a very challenging daypart,” she said at an industry event. “That’s not to say that Jimmy is not doing a phenomenal job, and his ratings are up. But they’re up relative to a smaller audience that’s watching late night on broadcast television.”

So, think about the show’s brand name as well: “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” The show averaged 2.0 million average viewers for the just completed 2025-2026 TV season, his best results in eight years, according to Nielsen’s National live-plus-same day ratings -- its Big Data + Panel program ratings.

Roughly 1.8 million viewers are actually live. Even then, key adults 18-49 keep slipping, now at around 200,000 to 300,000 viewers on average.

Increasingly, late night TV shows are also dependent on those opening monologues for promotion making their appearance on YouTube. And while there is some advertising revenue for that, it is nowhere near the requirement to keep a late-night TV program afloat.

Over the recent 12-month period (Sept. 22, 2025-Sept. 20, 2026), “Kimmel” has pulled in $114.4 million in national TV advertising revenue, according to iSpot.

Comparatively, “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” took in $95.3 million, while CBS’s “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” came in at $76.0 million. It went off the air May 21.

Disney is not giving up yet on "Kimmel." The show -- and Kimmel -- recently signed a one-year contract extension through the 2026-27 TV season.

After that? There may be another role for Kimmel after this.

“We’re trying to work through it and make sense of what Jimmy wants, what’s the right thing to do, and what’s the right thing for our business," Walden says.

A key brand name, including the word "live," is not likely to be part of its afterlife.