Jimmy and Stephen talk about both being “late night losers.” Jimmy shares how he found out that his show had been suspended. The network called him at 3pm while they were getting ready to tape that night’s show (the audience was already coming in). He said the scheduled guests were Howard Jones and chef Christian Petroni (Food Network Star S14 winner) who had already started making meatballs and polenta for his segment.
After talking to ABC, Jimmy thought his show was over forever. They sent home the audience but taped the show with the staff in the audience. Ironically, Howard Jones sang “Things Can Only Get Better.” When Jimmy and his wife finally left the studio, 20 paparazzi and 2 helicopters followed his car. When they arrived at home, his 11 year old daughter offered to sell her Labubus.
Jimmy said he spent the next three days making and receiving a lot of phone calls and texts. Stephen said that when his show was canceled, he gave his phone to his wife and told her to keep it away from him. When he was ready to look at his phone several days later, he saw that some of the people who had contacted him in the wake of his show’s cancellation were his high school girlfriend, James Taylor, and George R.R. Martin. In that spirit, he asked Jimmy who contacted him after his suspension was announced. He said just about everyone he had ever met called or texted him, including James Taylor. Jimmy suggested that he and Stephen compare what James Taylor said to each of them to see if he just copied and pasted the same message.
Jimmy originally planned to put up an Emmy billboard of himself that said, “Would you vote for me if I told you I was dying?” but after Stephen’s show got canceled, he changed it to encourage people to vote for Stephen.
Jimmy points out that Stephen has eight months left before The Late Show ends, so he asks when Stephen is going to finally go nuts.
Stephen said the last song he heard in the car while on his way to the Emmys was “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince so his wife and a friend told him to try to work that into his acceptance speech. Stephen said it was bittersweet that the nominations were announced the day before his show was canceled, but he brought EVERYONE from his staff to the Emmys so they could all celebrate.
Stephen and Jimmy (and Jon Stewart) all have the same manager. In July, this manager told Stephen they needed to talk for five minutes. It ended up being a two and a half hour talk where Stephen was told that his show had been canceled. Because he took so long, when he got home his wife jokingly said, “What happened? Did you get canceled?” His manager had actually known about the cancellation for a week but Stephen was in Greece and the manager kindly didn’t want to ruin his vacation.
Stephen didn’t know when to tell his staff that the show had been canceled. He considered waiting until the end of the summer but Evie told him that he needed to tell them the next day. He taped the entire episode and then asked everyone (including the audience) to stay so that he could tape one more segment. He went to his office and got the entire staff on Zoom so that he could tell them the show had been canceled and then he went out to record the announcement that the show had been canceled. Because this segment was not written ahead of time and there were no cue cards, he messed up twice which made the audience laugh because they thought he was doing a bit.
Jimmy and his family were at a No Kings protest when they found out that Stephen’s show had been canceled. Jimmy said he was shocked and that Stephen’s show being canceled is wrong.
When Jimmy found out that his show had been suspended, he immediately texted Seth, Fallon, Stephen, John Oliver, and Jon Stewart. Stephen was onstage filming his show at the time. His executive producer interrupted the taping to tell Stephen that Kimmel’s show had been pulled off the air indefinitely. There were no details so he asked the audience to wait while he found out what happened.