Late Night Last Week: The Kimmel-Colbert Crossover Special

Each week, Late Night Last Week highlights some of the best late night TV from the previous week. This week, we cover how late night hosts responded to the killing of Charlie Kirk and political violence in America. We also recap how each show did at the 2025 Emmy Awards.

Just as Jimmy Kimmel Live! was getting back into the swing of things following the host’s indefinite suspension from the airwaves, the show packed up and headed for Brooklyn. Last week, the program went live from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a long-running tradition that brings Jimmy Kimmel back to the borough of his birth for a full week of shows. The trip east also brought Kimmel into the mass media capital of the world, Manhattan, where he gave his first post-suspension interview to Stephen Colbert, who, just hours earlier, had crossed the East River and returned the favor to Kimmel.

Your humble correspondent had the chance to attend two tapings of Kimmel’s show—Monday’s return and Tuesday’s conversation with Colbert—where the enthusiastic, cathartic roars of the audience seemed to shake BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House. Kimmel fought back tears as he began his first monologue of the week, sharing that for a moment, they thought the Brooklyn shows would not happen. “Not because our show had been pulled off the air,” he said, “but because we were flying into Newark.”

The Monday night episode was also the first to mark the show’s return to full strength, as just the previous Friday, Sinclair and Nexstar announced they would once again broadcast Kimmel’s show across their affiliates. It seems too easy these days to label one moment as more significant than any other. But the simple fact of the matter is that the energy in the room at BAM, and indeed the reverberations of Kimmel’s return writ large, have the makings of a potential inflection point in the larger, ongoing fight over government censorship and free speech, whether it be by activists, noncitizens, or talk show hosts.

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On Tuesday, Colbert was Kimmel’s guest. “It’s the show the FCC doesn’t want you to see!” Kimmel declared during his monologue. Naturally, the two talked about the precarious business of late night. Kimmel was explicit in discussing Colbert’s show, blaming its cancellation directly on the actions of the Trump administration.

In his first post-cancellation interview, Colbert told Kimmel about getting a call from their shared manager, James “Baby Doll” Dixon, who broke the news to the host after his return from vacation. Colbert shared with Kimmel that he had told his wife, Evie, that he was stepping out for a quick conversation with Dixon. When he returned two-and-a-half hours later, she jokingly asked, “What happened, did you get cancelled?”

“I said, yes, I did,” Colbert told Kimmel.

Colbert also came equipped with a clip from the taping of his September 17 show, during which he learned in real time that Kimmel had been suspended. He placed his feet up on his desk a la Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men, shocked by the news. Unsure what to do next, the clip ends with Colbert walking off stage to learn more, as by that point he had not yet been told the rationale—he ultimately dedicated his September 18 broadcast to Kimmel.

“You figured I did something stupid, right?” Kimmel asked.

“I generally assume that it’s your fault,” Colbert replied. “I know you well enough to do that.”

Later that night, Kimmel followed Colbert back to Midtown for a taping of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. It was Colbert’s turn to ask Kimmel about the circumstances of his suspension. Kimmel shared that he received a call from ABC as a live studio waited for the taping of his show to begin. He took the call in the bathroom, the only private space in his shared office.

“My wife said I was whiter than Jim Gaffigan,” Kimmel said of the moment he walked out of the bathroom. “I thought: that’s it. It’s over.”

Kimmel also shared that he—like Colbert—receieved messages of support from the “Strike Force Face,” the club of late night hosts that includes the pair along with John Oliver, Seth Meyers, and Jimmy Fallon. They, along with Jon Stewart, have lately appeared on one another’s programs, showing solidarity in the face of a systemic threat to their genre and speech.

Oliver, Meyers, and Stewart have each delivered biting monologues in defense of Colbert and Kimmel. Fallon has come to their defense too, but in a minimal, mostly non-partisan way, focusing instead on his support for them as people and their right to make jokes. While other hosts seem ready to coordinate together against the corporate and government censorship, Fallon, whose show is consistently the most uninteresting on late night, seems to be in retreat, or at the very least a reluctant soldier in the proverbial free speech battle.

He said as much in an interview last week on CNBC. “Our show’s never really been that political,” Fallon said, adding that they try to hit “both sides equally.”

“I just keep my head down and make sure the jokes are funny. I have great writers—clever, smart writers,” he said. “We’re just trying to make the best show we possibly can and entertain everybody.”

The question now becomes whether others will do the same and retreat willingly or in the face of corporate pressure. Oliver, Stewart, and even Fallon’s NBC colleague Meyers seem unlikely to waver. How will Kimmel and Colbert (at least for now) soldier on as the faces of their respective networks? What will Colbert do next? Will Kimmel keep his foot on the gas?

I asked myself these questions as I watched the two men at BAM last week, leaning over the desk, backs hunched, whispering to one another during the commercial breaks, swept up into a late night war of a different sort.

Will DiGravio is a Brooklyn-based critic, researcher, and late night comedy columnist, who first contributed to Paste in 2022. He is an assistant editor at Cineaste, a GALECA member, and since 2019 has hosted The Video Essay Podcast. You can follow and/or unfollow him on Twitter and learn more about him via his website.