It’s never a smooth start when a new show comes in and ousts a current show in a similar genre. But that’s what happened with Jimmy Kimmel’s show at its start; “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” replaced “Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher” in 2003 (via The Los Angeles Times). And The New Yorker gave a pretty negative first review of Kimmel’s show in 2003, saying it was a “dead-on-arrival talk show with a charisma-free host, aimed at pre-adolescent male viewers between eighteen and thirty-four.”
Because the ABC network wanted a night-time talk show that was a bit more casual than David Letterman’s show, Kimmel was the top choice. Lloyd Braun, one of the big whigs at ABC at the time, told The New York Times in 2002 that he expected younger men to be the prime audience for Kimmel’s show. So choosing someone who did funny football segments for Fox was the vibe they wanted to go with. As the New Yorker review shows, it wasn’t well-received by all.
“There was always talk of [cancellation],” Kimmel told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016 (via Yahoo!). When he sees old clips, even he doesn’t know why ABC kept him on the air. “And I could almost mark each one of those times because there were probably six or seven times where the show was going to get canceled and I would’ve welcomed it at that time because I really just was out, I was spent.”
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