Kimmel Set for Live Comeback
Call it the One Man Show.
Jimmy Kimmel is set to return to the airwaves with fresh episodes of his late-night funnyfest starting Jan. 2, the same night that NBC's night-owl lineup is scheduled to start rolling for the first time since the writers' strike began.
But Kimmel, like Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, won't be permitted to use any kind of written gags or sketches and will instead have to rely on ad-libbing during his shows.
"Though it makes me sick to do so without my writers, there are more than a hundred people whose financial well-being depends on our show," Kimmel, a Writers Guild of America member, said in a statement Tuesday.
“It is time to go back to work. I support my colleagues and friends in the WGA completely and hope this ends both fairly and soon.”
Kimmel has been refusing to cross union picket lines, and his show, which includes among its nonwriting crew a handful of Kimmel's close friends and relatives, has been in repeats since Nov. 5.
Kimmel and the other top late-night emcees have been paying their nonwriting staffs' salaries out of pocket since mid-November to ward off mass firings that the networks ensured would occur if the strike continues into 2008.
NBC confirmed Monday that Leno and O'Brien will be back in their respective studios Jan. 2, albeit without their writing teams.
Also expected to announce his return sometime this week is David Letterman, but the CBS host's Worldwide Pants production arm is first trying to hammer out a deal with the WGA that would allow Late Show scribes to head back to work along with their bespectacled boss. The same arrangement would apply to the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, which is also owned by Letterman's company.
"We are willing to agree to the writers' demands that are within our control, so we have no reason to believe that an interim agreement can't be achieved with the WGA," Rob Burnett, president and CEO of Worldwide Pants, said in a statement Tuesday. "As a result, our only focus is on returning January second with writers."
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are also reportedly in talks with Comedy Central to get back in front of the cameras as soon as possible.
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