If it weren’t for two, simple words – “You’re fired!” – Donald Trump might never have become president. The Apprentice taught the flaxen-haired New Yorker the power of television, not to mention the impact of a good catchphrase. This week, his obsession with TV and firings collided, as Jimmy Kimmel – a long term critic of the President – was suspended from his eponymous talk show in the fallout of comments made about the assassination of right-wing polemicist Charlie Kirk. It has laid bare a new reality: that TV is a front in the culture wars.
“We hit some new lows over the weekend,” Kimmel told his audience, after suspected killer Tyler Robinson was arrested. “With the MAGA gang trying to characterise [Robinson] as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” These comments – the sort of innocuously partisan messaging that has always been commonplace on the late-night shows – drew criticism from Kirk’s fanbase, a mob that includes the current Oval Office incumbent. When ABC, the channel that airs Jimmy Kimmel Live!, announced the programme’s suspension, the president took to Truth Social to offer feedback. “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done,” he wrote. “Kimmel has ZERO talent.” He ended by imploring NBC to fire its two late-night hosts: Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers.
Even here in Britain, where attempts to import American-style late night shows have largely fallen flat, we understand the importance of this sort of programming. It’s where hit movies are made or broken, where popstars launch careers, where disgraced celebrities attempt to rehabilitate their images. What might be less obvious, however, is how these channels have become battlegrounds in America’s febrile political moment.
Jimmy Kimmel Live! is made by ABC, a major network that was acquired by Disney in 1996. It is distributed across the country via regional affiliates, and it was these powerful middlemen who put the squeeze on Kimmel. With the FCC – the comms regulator, which has been effectively captured by the Trump administration – breathing down their neck, these provincial brokers started pulling Kimmel’s show. Eventually, ABC had little choice but to put production on hold. Cue braying celebrations from right-wing free speech “absolutists” (absolut-ish?) and an outcry from the beleaguered remnants of liberal America.
It is perhaps no surprise that the air war is being fought on American TV. Here in the UK, your choice of television channel says little about you. Big ITV fan? Sounds normal. Huge Channel 5 aficionado? Pretty weird, but you do you. Attempts have been made to launch more factional channels, usually on the right, with limited success. GB News, for example, had about 80,000 average viewers this year, compared to the 3.1 million Americans who, on average, tune into Fox News. In other words, at any time roughly 0.12 per cent of the UK population are turned into GB News, whereas 0.98 per cent of Americans are watching Fox.
And it’s a pretty safe bet that those Fox watchers vote Republican. If they prefer MSBNC, however, they likely lean Democrat. It goes beyong current affairs programming, too: entertainment channels like HBO have been closely associated with liberal audiences (and talk shows like Real Time with Bill Maher reinforce that), while the Paramount Network has cornered the market in so-called “conservative prestige TV”. America is, after all, a huge country, one that is served the greatest smorgasbord of entertainment in human history. There is space, in that market, for products that serve liberals and products that serve conservatives.
But recent years have seen the flattening of this variation. Netflix precipitated the expansion of mammoth streaming services, which require audiences of all political stripes. To square this, they have attempted to embrace diverse stories while also commissioning comedy specials from the likes of Dave Chapelle, Ricky Gervais and Bill Burr. It is a delicate balance, but one that Amazon Prime and AppleTV+ (streamers who are underwritten by other, not insignificant, commercial interests) also attempt to walk. And then, looming over this new world is America’s great cultural Death Star: Disney.
Disney owns ABC, Kimmel’s employer. It also owns Fox Entertainment (though not Fox News, which is still part of the Murdoch empire). It owns ESPN and National Geographic and FX and Hulu. It owns Marvel and Star Wars and Pixar and The Muppets. It is a monolith, the likes of which American culture has never seen before.
The company is also scared of the president. We saw that during the furore over Florida’s “don’t say gay” bill, which resulted in a long feud between the company and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Since then, Disney has appeared eager to be inoffensive – never a great condition for art. Some of this correction is more defensible – after all, it’s clear that the late-night shows have skewed liberal for a long time, in a way that doesn’t mirror America’s political make-up – but the timing of the latest bout of pusillanimity is worrying. It comes in the wake of Stephen Colbert’s show being axed by CBS and a South Park episode about Kirk (titled “Got a Nut”) being withdrawn from syndication, even though Kirk himself called the portrayal “hilarious”. American TV, it seems, is right at the centre of the culture wars.
And perhaps the biggest reason for this is the president himself. His reaction to Kimmel’s comments wasn’t to critique the insensitivity or mourn the death of a supposed friend. “Jimmy Kimmel is not a talented person,” he told a press conference. “He had very bad ratings and they should’ve fired him a long time ago.” Trump is, himself, a product of television, and it is a device that obsesses him. He treats the White House like a late-night set, polling figures like Neilson ratings, and each term of office like a bingeable boxset. With a president who cares too much about TV, and an electorate who care too little about politics, shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live! have been caught up in a proxy war being fought on American airwaves.
