The New York Times version of events of Jimmy Kimmel’s appearance at the “up front” presentations:
If Jimmy Kimmel still has a job at ABC on Wednesday, he is either a very lucky or very deft comedian, or he has great blackmail photos of the network executives.
At Tuesday afternoon’s upfront presentation in New York, Mr. Kimmel, the host of ABC’s late night talk show “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” delivered a withering, blistering monologue that took direct aim at ABC, its potential advertisers and his NBC late-night rival, Jay Leno. The assembled advertisers received his performance with a mixture of uneasy laughs and the occasional gasp.
Sounds bad, right? Except. . .
And here’s the Hollywood insider’s version from Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood blog:
Some of you have been emailing me about the “shocking” stuff that Jimmy Kimmel said at the ABC upfront, just because it was described by The New York Times as “a withering, blistering monologue that took direct aim at ABC [and] its potential advertisers”. I’ve finally caught up with it. Not only am I not shocked, I’m not even surprised. And I have this to say to the NYT’s Dave Itzkoff (a former Maxim editor): Either you haven’t watched many network upfront presentations. Or you need to man up if you’re trying to tell me what Kimmel said was more ballbusting than previous upfronts. (UPDATE: As a Kimmel insider just told me, “Yeah, Dave didn’t seem to get it. No blow back at all. [ABC Entertainment boss Steve] McPherson was laughing. Like you said, they know what kind of humor Jimmy is going to do. No one was surprised.”)