Ask A Genius 1524: Jimmy Kimmel’s Return Monologue, Late Night TV History, and Alien Earth Recap
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/09/24
What did Jimmy Kimmel’s return monologue actually change?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen interviews Rick Rosner on Jimmy Kimmel’s unusually long, sincere return monologue: conciliatory, not apologetic, and unlikely to sway entrenched audiences as legacy TV ratings slide. Rosner situates late night from Steve Allen to Carson to Kimmel and Stewart, noting faster modern news inputs. He then recaps Alien: Earth’s penultimate chaos: synths captured, Prodigy overwhelmed, and Boy Cavalier’s arrogant eye-midge gambit amid Weyland-Yutani’s assault, forecasting multi-season survival math. Touching mortality, they lament Robert Jarvik’s death and reflect on Parkinson’s familial risk, treatment horizons, and resilience. Through it all: speech, satire, and the First Amendment’s enduring guardrails still matter.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, tell me about Kimmel’s speech. We have to get back.
Rick Rosner: All right. I watched most of his monologue—the first 20 minutes. It was very long, longer than a standard monologue. It was good. It had funny moments, and moments where he was frank—really, it was sincere throughout.
He was conciliatory without being apologetic. It will change no one’s mind—or very few people’s. The people who like him will still like him. Those who dislike him for political reasons will continue to dislike him for the same reasons. He might gain a few more fans. Will they stick with him night after night? The ratings across network television suggest otherwise; all legacy shows are trending down as viewing habits shift. But he did a good job.
He always does—he and his team. While he was suspended, the story was big enough that a couple of reporters tracked me down. I didn’t talk to them then because I hadn’t worked for him in 11 years, and I didn’t want to wade into it. Today, after he was scheduled to return, a reporter who’d spoken with a couple of other former Kimmel writers contacted me. I agreed to talk anonymously and offered a couple of innocuous comments. The main one was that late-night talk shows have been on the air for 71 years, they’ve joked about 13 presidents, and only one president has actively tried to shut them down. And then…
Late night started on U.S. network TV in 1954, during the Eisenhower administration, with Tonight hosted by Steve Allen. Before that, Allen had done a local late-night show in New York starting in 1953. Did they do a monologue every night at first? I’m not sure, but by the time Johnny Carson took over in October 1962, the structure was well-established: an opening monologue, a house band, interviews with guests, and often a stand-up performance.
That basic format lasted for decades. Letterman began to experiment with it, and Kimmel and Jon Stewart later further developed it—especially with tightly edited clip montages that showcased public figures’ contradictions. Back in Carson’s era, source material was primarily newspapers and the AP teletype—a networked typewriter that spit out Associated Press bulletins all day—so the raw inputs were slower and fewer than the firehose later shows could mine. The Tonight Show launched nationally in 1954. For roughly a year before that, Allen’s late-night program was local to New York.
Eisenhower served from 1953 to 1961, so the early Tonight years overlapped with his presidency; they indeed joked about him, including his love of golf—he played a lot.
And I don’t know what more the jokes would have been, because I’m not familiar with what Eisenhower’s foibles were in that time period. However, he and every subsequent president were often joked about. The reporter asked me, “What do you think of Kimmel being at the center of all this?” And I said, “He’s not the one dividing us.
The president is the one dividing us.” He didn’t use that comment. But Jimmy Kimmel put himself in perspective during tonight’s monologue, saying he’s got a little show. It’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is the First Amendment and the freedom for shows like his to say what they want without threats of being taken off the air. Now, some commentators have said he didn’t apologize, but he did, in a sense. He said he didn’t want anyone to think he was making light of the murder of a young man. He had kind words and praise for Erica Kirk. So, there you go.
Jacobsen: What about Alien: Earth?
Rosner: So, I started to watch the final episode. I’m 12 minutes into episode eight, the final episode. We didn’t talk yesterday because my mic wasn’t working. But I also saw the end of episode seven last night, where Hermit, the human, takes two of the synths. He’s trying to get them to a boat so they can escape the island. When they reach it, they’re confronted by a group of Prodigy soldiers, including some Hermit had worked with before. There was a confrontation, and Nibs, the red-haired synth, got shot a couple of times, but it didn’t hurt her much because she’s a synth. She fought back and injured someone badly, but then she was tased, which shut her down long enough for the human brother and the remaining synths—five of them in total—to be captured. Weyland-Yutani is attacking the island.
They’ve cut all communication with the outside world. Prodigy, which owns the island, is losing soldiers, mainly to the xenomorphs. Conditions are deteriorating. Boy Cavalier is in his office with a containment chamber holding the sheep with the eye-midge parasite. Boy Cavalier has been told by Kirsch to get his act together, given the danger they’re all in. But Boy Cavalier is being arrogant and is considering letting the eye midge transfer into a human host, because he wants to communicate with it. That’s obviously a terrible idea.
But if people didn’t do stupid things, you wouldn’t have the Alien movies. The aliens—just as in the films—are incredibly dangerous. They could kill everyone anyway, but in all the Alien stories, people make critical mistakes that cost them their lives, often through greed. Boy Cavalier is driven by arrogance. I don’t know if he’ll survive. He has to make it through the next 35 minutes of the show to see if he makes it into the second season.
They might keep him alive because the show is designed to last multiple seasons. As I’ve said, when you sell a TV series, executives want to know what five years of story arc would look like—not in detail, but generally. So more humans and synths will survive this series than in the Alien films, where almost everyone is wiped out because this isn’t the end. It’s clearly popular, and I’m sure it’ll get renewed, though it looks costly. Reportedly, this was the most significant production ever shot in Thailand, with 15 or 16 sound stages operating simultaneously.
Jacobsen: Have you seen the fake plant?
Rosner: Not yet, no. I
Jacobsen: I look ahead.
Rosner: So there’s this thing—is that the dangling watermelon, or is that something different?
Jacobsen: Yeah.
Rosner: So the dangling watermelon is a vegetable and not an animal? Is that the deal? Or maybe it’s one fake and one real, honestly.
Jacobsen: You know who died from Parkinson’s this year?
Rosner: No.
Jacobsen: Robert Jarvik.
Rosner: That’s sad. That’s Marilyn’s husband.
Jacobsen: I saw it in an interview. He was shaking a few years ago, and I thought, “Yeah.”
Rosner: He wasn’t that old either.
Jacobsen: Seventy-nine.
Rosner: That’s not old for now.
Jacobsen: About average for an American man. A little older, actually.
Rosner: Yeah, yeah. But he was a doctor with resources. My dad had Parkinson’s. My grandpa had Parkinson’s. But it was a late onset for both. I don’t think it killed my grandpa, who lived to 96 and a half. It certainly affected my dad in his last few years, but I don’t know that it killed him. Anyway, I might consider that in the future, but if it’s a late-onset condition and I make it to my 80s—that’s another 15 years—they might have good treatments by then. I’m not particularly worried about Parkinson’s. I’m more concerned about other things. Anyway, my condolences to Marilyn vos Savant.
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