Jimmy Kimmel said a scheduled interview with James Talarico will not air on ABC and will instead be posted on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! YouTube channel, a last-minute move he tied to federal broadcast rules. Kimmel announced the change Wednesday night, one day before Talarico had been set to appear on the show.
Talarico is a Texas Democratic U.S. Senate candidate and state representative from the Austin area who is running against Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in November. Kimmel said the concern is that federal rules could require ABC to give similar airtime to Talarico’s opponent, something the network does not have to navigate on YouTube because FCC broadcast rules do not apply there.
The switch matters because it pushes a campaign conversation out of broadcast television and onto a platform with looser rules on political access. Kimmel said he has interviewed Americans running for office for more than 20 years without a problem, making the new restriction stand out to viewers who have seen candidates treated as ordinary guests in the past.
The move also follows a pattern. In February, Stephen Colbert interviewed Talarico for The Late Show and that conversation was posted to YouTube instead of airing on CBS, where it went on to draw more than 9.5 million views. Kimmel’s decision means Talarico is again reaching viewers through a streaming platform rather than a network broadcast, and again for reasons tied to how political speech is handled on television.
That broader fight has already drawn ABC, Disney and the FCC into conflict. In September 2025, ABC temporarily pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air after comments Kimmel made about the killing of Charlie Kirk, and FCC Chair Brendan Carr publicly criticized those remarks. Earlier, in April, the FCC ordered an early review of the broadcast licenses for eight ABC-owned television stations, including one in Houston, after President Trump called for ABC’s licenses to be revoked. ABC and Disney sued the FCC in August, arguing the agency was using its license power to retaliate over news coverage and programming, including Jimmy Kimmel Live!.
Kimmel said Donald Trump appeared on the show while running for president in 2016, but now that Trump is president, his FCC threatened him, the show, ABC, its affiliates and local stations over what Kimmel described as ordinary booking decisions. Carr has said the FCC has not decided whether to renew the stations’ licenses and that it will continue to follow the facts and the law wherever they may lead. For now, the unanswered question is not whether Talarico will appear — he will — but how far broadcasters will go in keeping campaign politics off the air.
