Jimmy Kimmel Threatens Jean Smart in Hilarious ‘Hacks’ Clip

I was first hired here to cover the late-night talk show scene. Then, presumably, when Dustin got tired of receiving cease and desist letters from Team Coco Productions, he asked that I start covering a wider breadth of topics. For instance, would you like to watch Hugh Jackman breathing for eight hours?

Regardless of my expanded duties, the late-night scene still manages to find its way into my purview. Occasionally, I’ll be able to pull a quote from someone’s talk show interview without focusing on where it originated. Other times I can isolate a sketch or segment from a show that has some crossover appeal. And, dammit, sometimes I need to talk about a brilliant, gigantic, redheaded man who I admire greatly and who I’m sure would return that admiration if he answered even one of the many letters I’ve sent him with our official Pajiba letterhead (which I had made unbeknownst to Dustin).

Today’s piece is an example of me being able to talk about late-night and gush about something I love: Hacks. The Jean Smart and Hannah Einbender comedy is one of the best things to air on television in recent memory. It’s so good that its next season will be its last (the best shows know when to call it quits, though that doesn’t always mean early *Cough It’s Always Sunny Cough*). They’ll be ending their run with Deborah Vance (Smart) launching her new late-night show and making some new enemies.

The current crop of real-life network late-night hosts (Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and Jimmy Kimmel) are friends. They were united by their shared boredom during the 2023 Writer’s Strike and the fact that they’re all straight white men (“Where’d you get your light blue button up?”). That’s the late-night landscape, and Deborah Vance disrupts it significantly (at least fictionally). Smart recently shared a clip from the upcoming season on Jimmy Kimmel: Live and the clip features the man himself!

It’s very sweet to hear Kimmel say he was nervous to do that scene, and it makes sense! Smart is giving a career performance on Hacks, but Kimmel does a great job going toe to toe with her. He pokes fun at James Corden’s late-night exit, and to get jokes like that two years after his exit is both funny and a stinging indictment of the late-night landscape going forward. But, in the Hacks world, Late-night is so much more lively that a slot opening was seen as competition for up-and-comers and not an excuse for CBS to run MyPillow commercials or whatever it’s going to do!