Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Jimmy Kimmel Live! is a mainstay of ABC’s schedule, its late-night anchor and frequent Emmy nominee. Joining me for a conversation for Deadline’s Contenders TV: Doc + Unscripted event were executive producer/co-head writer Molly McNearney, co-head writer/supervising producer Danny Ricker and supervising producer/writer Gary Greenberg.
McNearney, who also is married to the host, talked about the challenges of turning out a nightly late-night talk show and keeping it fresh after all these years.
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“I think the biggest challenge is probably just having coming up with original content every single night, and it’s weird because late-night can feel like it’s the same.” she said. “The day can feel repetitive because the formula of the day stays the same. The deadlines. You read the news stories in the morning. You put in the joke deadlines, pitch the bits, have rehearsal at the same time, get the scripts in. That can feel repetitive, but the stories we’re covering are very different every day. They have started to feel like the same in the last few years. I think we can all say there’s a big orange elephant in the room that we have been reporting on night after night, and I think finding new ways to do that has luckily been fairly easy because we have so much material to work with every day.”
That would be a reference to Donald Trump, often a target of host Kimmel, and one he doesn’t pretend to take a stand on — which Greenberg described as unavoidable.
“I mean it’s become a huge thing. If you watch the first decade of our show, we barely talked about politics and when we did it was usually like, ‘Oh look, George Bush had trouble opening a door or Barack Obama wore tan pants,’ and that was like a big story and we ran with it,” he said. “But then when Trump started spewing his vitriol it was crazy. Like it was like nothing we had ever seen before, and in the beginning we had no clue that it would last this long. If somebody were to tell us in 2015 that in 2024 it would be half of our monologue every night, that would have been crazy. But it just snowballed and snowballed, and the bigger he got the more we sort of feel like we need to push against this because it keeps getting crazier. Yeah, I remember back in the old days — you know, American Idol would be a quarter of our monologue when it would be on, or The Bachelor. And now, you know, Trump has sort of forced us to be politicized because you just can’t not talk about the insanity that’s going on.”
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The show also likes to do lots of bits with real people outside the studio on Hollywood Boulevard, including segments like “Liewitness News,” where they ask passersby about ridiculously invented news stories they present as real. Most of these people come across as so ill-informed and clueless, and some think they must be plants. Ricker insists they aren’t.
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“You know, man-on-the-street bits and all these things, Jimmy would rather not do something than fake it, you know? And that’s something that I think the writers all have to learn when they start at the show, which is [that] nothing on our show is ever faked,” he said. “I mean, we could spend tons of money on a prank, and if it doesn’t go well, we’re not going to be like, ‘Hey, go back out there and pretend.’ It’s like, ‘Hey, it didn’t work; we’re not going to air it.’ That’s an aspect of authenticity that we certainly enjoy at our show and we hope the audience feels too.”
