The truth is, we have this idea that late night is about creativity and being cool, but that’s not our job. Our job is to get as many people watching the commercials in between our show. That’s the reality of it.

Kimmel punctures the romantic self-image of late-night television as a playground for edgy artistry and cultural cachet. He reframes the host’s role in bluntly economic terms: the show exists within a commercial broadcast system whose primary metric is audience retention through ad breaks. The quote highlights the tension between creative ambition and institutional purpose—how even “cool” cultural products are often structured by advertising incentives. Read this way, it’s both a candid admission and a critique of the medium’s constraints, suggesting that what viewers experience as entertainment is also engineered as a vehicle for selling attention.