Jimmy Kimmel Comeback Episode Becomes Most-Watched Episode

The highly anticipated return of Jimmy Kimmel Live! after its brief hiatus raked in a massive 6.3 million viewers. This episode now stands as the most-watched regular broadcast in the show’s history.

September 25, 2025: Jimmy Kimmel‘s return to late-night TV on Tuesday night after a week-long break was a huge hit with viewers. It had the biggest audience for a regularly scheduled episode in the show’s history.

The presenter, who ABC booted off the air after making contentious comments regarding the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, gave an emotional monologue full of tears that talked about the incident and defended free expression.

Record Number of Viewers Despite Blackout

The episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! got a huge 6.3 million viewers on regular TV, which is more than three times the show’s normal audience (1.4 million in the previous season). This number is especially interesting given 23% of U.S. homes didn’t get to see the show because Nexstar and Sinclair kept interrupting it on their affiliate stations.

The show has only had a bigger audience twice: on special Sundays right after the 2006 Super Bowl and the 2014 Oscars.

The show got a 0.87 rating in the key advertiser group of adults ages 18 to 49. This was the greatest rating for a regularly scheduled episode in over 10 years and a 568% rise from the previous season’s average.

Kimmel’s speech for free speech in America has been seen by tens of millions of people on digital platforms, and his YouTube views are going up by more than a million an hour.

Kimmel’s Explanation and Emotional Speech
The argument started after Kimmel said something after the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was shot and died in Utah during a college event by Tyler Robinson, who is now a suspect.

Kimmel’s original tweet that caused the interruption was, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

Kimmel made his point clear in an emotional comeback on Tuesday:

He cried and said, “I don’t think it’s funny.” The day he died, I wrote on Instagram to give love to his family and ask for kindness. “I meant it, and I still do.”

He said he wasn’t attempting to say that Tyler Robinson, the shooter of Kirk, was connected to MAGA; he called him “obviously a deeply disturbed individual.”

“It was really the reverse of what I was trying to say. “But I know that for some, it felt either poorly timed or unclear,” he continued, admitting that some people were unhappy without actually saying sorry.

A lot of people think that the huge increase in viewers is a sign of how much people are interested in a big political and media scandal.