Jimmy Kimmel is a producer on the latest ESPN 30 for 30 project, Once Upon A Time In Queens, and he joined the SI Media Podcast with Jimmy Traina to discuss the documentary. What he might not have planned on talking about is the friction between him, Howie Long, and Terry Bradshaw.
Kimmel worked on the FOX NFL pregame show from 1999 to 2002; during that time he got on the bad side of Long and Bradshaw.
“I was going through stories the other day with guys that I had just met,” Kimmel said on the show. “I was telling story after story, and I was thinking like… ‘what’s with these guys that they don’t like me, don’t they have a sense of humor?’ And as I told story after story I was like, ‘of course they didn’t like me, it doesn’t make any sense for them to like me,’ I was an asshole.”
Long and Bradshaw were upset with Kimmel’s jokes about them, of which, Jimmy Kimmel clarified on the podcast as poorly edited for TV.
“They were editing my bits at FOX, and they were doing a very bad job of it,” Kimmel described. “They were editing them like they edit sports bits, which doesn’t work for comedy, and I really wanted control of these bits, and the guys hated me. “
Jimmy Kimmel described the meetings FOX had over whether they should fire him.
“They would have these meetings and are like, ‘you have to get rid of this guy, why are you giving our time to this as*hole, he’s making fun of us, he’s not funny, he sucks, get rid of the guy.’ So Scott [Ackerson] came up with one of the worst plans ever.”
The plan ended up being a call-in vote to remove Jimmy Kimmel from the show based on viewer call-ins. Yes, FOX left Kimmel’s NFL pregame show fate up to the masses, and they decided to keep him around. Listen to the rest of the interview here on Apple, Spotify and Stitcher.