Late-night TV has been a staple of the medium for decades, but in recent months, we’ve seen all of late-night TV undergo some significant upheaval, from the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel. A great deal has been made over how much late-night shows are allegedly losing, but Kimmel is clapping back at the numbers.
When CBS announced the cancellation of The Late Show, it argued that the decision was purely a financial one, as the show had been losing money for the network. Some reports claim that the show was losing as much as $40 million or more in a year, but in a recent appearance at the Bloomberg Screentime Conference, Jimmy Kimmel said there’s no way the show was losing that much. He explained:
I know what the budgets for these shows are. I know what I make, I know what Stephen [Colbert] makes. I know what the ad salespeople make. I know that there are values that nobody bothers to consider, like the affiliate fees that have to account for a portion of that when you talk about an hour of television, every night, five nights a week, so, I know that it’s not $40 million.
Kimmel estimated that the budget for a late-night show was somewhere in the range of $120 million. However, figuring out exactly how much a show makes and how much it costs, as Kimmel says here, is far more complicated to figure out. He specifically points out affiliate fees, which are something that a network gets paid so that the station can air all the content from the network. Certainly, some portion of that fee should be attributed to the late-night show, but how much it’s worth is impossible to say.
In the end, Jimmy Kimmel admits that he can’t say whether his show, or other late-night shows, make money or lose money. He’s at least willing to accept that the shows might ultimately be money losers for the network, but as Kimmel has argued before, he says there’s no way they lose $40 million, because they would have been canceled long before now if that were the case. He continued:
I also know this. If we’re losing so much money, none of us would be on. That’s kind of all you need to know. I mean, this is not PBS. … if they lost 40 million dollars last year, they would have sent everyone home.
To be fair, in the case of The Late Show, they are sending everyone home next year. And we have seen other late-night shows face budget cuts. What the future holds for Kimmel and other late-night hosts is unclear at this point. There’s no indication that any of them are in line to be canceled.