Jimmy Kimmel is giving his buddy Stephen Colbert more of the spotlight when he says goodbye to “The Late Show” next week.
Kimmel will not produce a new episode for May 21, “out of deference to Colbert’s sendoff” and will instead let a rerun take over his 11:35 p.m. ET time slot on ABC, LateNighter reported on Monday.
Kimmel made the same gesture in 2015 when he didn’t drop a new episode on the night that Colbert’s predecessor, David Letterman, bid farewell to the CBS program.
Colbert’s friend over at NBC, Jimmy Fallon, appears to still be planning to air a new episode of “The Tonight Show” in the 11:35 p.m. ET time slot on May 21.
Fallon and his NBC colleague Seth Meyers will, nonetheless, not air new episodes on Monday when they join Kimmel and fellow late-night heavyweight John Oliver for a “Strike Force Five” reunion on Colbert’s show. (Kimmel isn’t scheduled to air new episodes this week.)
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Letterman, meanwhile, is set to return to the Ed Sullivan Theater as a guest on Colbert’s show this coming Thursday.
It marks just the second time that Letterman, who created “The Late Show,” will return to the program since his 2015 departure and the first time since he slammed CBS for what he described as its “gutless” decision last year to can Colbert.
He recently put the “lying weasels” at CBS and its Trump-aligned parent company on blast for saying the move was due to purely financial reasons.
“I’m just going to go on record as saying: They’re lying,” Letterman said of network leadership in an interview with The New York Times.