Jimmy Kimmel’s Still Fighting for Late Night

My chat with ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ E.P. Molly McNearney on Trump, Colbert and what’s left: ‘Tell the truth and be funny’

COUPLE GOALS Jimmy Kimmel, left, with Molly McNearney at the Oscars this year.ichael Buckner/Penske Media via Getty Images

If you currently have an Emmy ballot sitting in your inbox, congratulations! You are among the thousands of people who have been feverishly targeted by all the events, interviews, promotional stunts and occasional lavish parties over the past few weeks — and now it’s time for you to do the actual work. Including math, sorry to say!

The Emmy ballots, which anyone can read, are famously long, and the rules are fairly convoluted — with the number of submissions determining how many nominees there will be in many top categories. When there are 20-80 submissions, the result is five nominees; 81-160 submissions trigger six nominees; 161-240 submissions mean seven nominees; above 241 submissions there are eight nominees. (But for drama and comedy series, there are eight slots no matter how many submissions.)

So, based on all that, for the second consecutive year, there will be only five nominees in all lead acting categories (there were six slots in 2024), while the supporting categories will feature seven nominees for comedy and drama series, and six for limited series.

These fluctuating nomination tallies highlight the ups and downs of TV production and also create quite the headache for your poor hardworking pundits, who can’t ever accurately predict the nominees until the ballots are out. But hey, we’re finally there! My colleague Christopher Rosen will be digging into what else is in those ballots in a live conversation on YouTube and the Prestige Junkie After Party Substack later today, so join us either live at 11 a.m. PT or catch the replay to learn about all the other delightful weird details. Who got submitted as a guest actor, and who got left out? Which original songs were on TV that we forgot all about? The Emmy ballots are always a wild ride!

But for now I’m handing things over to someone who has won an Emmy for writing the Oscars and has been nominated an additional 16 times — and if she wins an Emmy this year, it will almost certainly be because the president helped make her show the biggest news story in America last fall.

On a recent trip to New York City, Molly McNearney had dinner with Evie Colbert. The two have played very different roles in recent late-night history — McNearney is the executive producer and head writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live! and is married to its host; Colbert was an occasional but beloved guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert during her husband’s run. (Evie also recently shifted to become president emeritus at Montclair Film, the New Jersey-based org that runs the Montclair Film Festival and is always so welcoming to Team Ankler.)

But still, the two share a bond that has only become more focused and fraught in the past year. “I thought, how nice to have dinner with someone who has such a very specific experience in life that is similar to mine,” McNearney tells me during a recent call from her office at Jimmy Kimmel’s show in Los Angeles. “To be married to one of the late-night hosts constantly in the crosshairs of the president and his following, and to have children you’re raising in this world where their dad is being threatened by the president — and they’re just trying to do their jobs and tell the truth and be funny.”

Kimmel is now taking a larger share of the heat in that spotlight, with The Late Show ending last month with a final episode that included cameos from Kimmel and the other remaining late-night hosts (Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart, John Oliver and Seth Meyers). Losing Stephen Colbert’s show and his relentless needling of Donald Trump feels like “one less person on the front line with us,” McNearney says. “It does feel a little lonely in late night. It feels empowering, but also lonely. It’s hard for me to even be on social media, to watch people doing other things when we are fighting as hard as we can to bring attention to the things that really matter right now.”

Jimmy Kimmel Live! is preparing for a summer hiatus and then a return for what could, in theory, be its final season. Kimmel’s contract with ABC ends next year, and as New York’s Kathryn van Arendonk put it on my latest episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, Kimmel is in the awkward position of wanting the same thing Donald Trump wants: for Jimmy Kimmel Live! to end.

“I definitely think Jimmy could be fly-fishing right now if Kamala Harris was president,” McNearney agrees. “We get told all the time by strangers on the street how much this show means to them. People come up to Jimmy in tears thanking him. I think we are giving people a voice and making them feel a little less crazy at the end of every day. And we definitely feel this sense of responsibility we probably would not have felt had a confident, capable person been at the steering wheel of our country.”

So instead of taking a proper summer break, McNearney and Kimmel will be following the news even when their show is off the air — she says the time away drives them especially crazy when big news happens, like the Late Show’s cancellation. If you’re going to have to read the news these days, it seems, you’d better have a way to process it — and McNearney and Kimmel have a TV show. As she puts it, “I feel very lucky to have a job that lets me ingest these horrors and then have something to do with it.”

When the show was pulled off the air by Disney following Kimmel’s comments about the right-wing response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, it sparked an outrage so intense that even Ted Cruz was on Kimmel’s side. The decision was reversed after a few days, a period during which McNearney and Kimmel holed up in their Los Angeles home, avoiding the helicopters outside and explaining to their two youngest children that it was all because the president was mad about something their father had said. (She and Kimmel try to shield their 11-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son from most of the vitriol directed at their dad.)

“I can’t imagine growing up and knowing that Ronald Reagan didn’t like my dad,” says McNearney, 48. After those days at home, it was time to return to work and find a way for Kimmel to address the whole situation on the air, in an emotional, nearly 30-minute monologue that now has 23 million views.

As impossible as that task may seem to most of us, it seemed to be exactly what McNearney and Kimmel needed. Returning to work, McNearney says, “our nervous systems needed to be calmed, but we didn’t really have a lot of time for it. We’re so deadline-driven here. We all were so emotional and so grateful to see each other, but it was really right back to work.”

So while they brace for the midterm elections, the rest of the Trump presidency and whatever the future of Jimmy Kimmel Live! may be, McNearney and her writers are doing the one thing they do best in difficult times: writing jokes.

The writers room consists of 20 people if you count Kimmel, each of them charged with contributing to the day’s monologue as well as pitching bits for the show’s guests. It’s large for any writers room, late night included, but “the more the merrier, honestly,” says McNearney. “There are days, especially now with the psychological toll of writing to this insanity, that you don’t have anything good and it’s important that somebody always does. On the days that you’re feeling a little off, someone else is having a great day.”

McNearney’s comedy writing career is hugely unusual for how stable it’s been, with more than 20 years writing for the same show. When I ask her what continues to drive her to show up to the writers room each day, she says it’s the people — and what they continue to have in common after this especially rough year of scrutiny.

“It’s an amazing team here who genuinely care about the country, and that starts with Jimmy,” McNearney says. “I love being around all these creative, smart people who care about integrity and democracy and comedy — people I love who care about the same things that I do.”