‘Americans, don’t take this sitting down’ Russians say the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s show feels familiar. Here’s what became of the country’s TV comedy shows that dared to criticize the Kremlin.
On Wednesday evening, the American TV network ABC announced that it was indefinitely suspending comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show. The news came just hours after the head of the FCC, the U.S. broadcast regulator, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, blasted Kimmel for comments he made on his show two days earlier about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Kimmel is now the second late-night host to be taken off the air under what many observers argue is undue political pressure from the Trump administration following public criticism of the president and his allies. Two months earlier, CBS announced it was cancelling The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, whose host has been one of Trump’s most prominent satirical critics for the past decade.
CBS claimed the cancellation was made for financial reasons and not based on the content of Colbert’s show. ABC has not explained its decision to pull Kimmel’s show, but it came shortly after two of the largest TV station owners in the U.S. said they would preempt the program on their channels in response to the host’s comments. According to Rolling Stone, multiple ABC executives said in meetings before the announcement that Kimmel had not “said anything over the line” but that “the threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed.”
After news broke of Kimmel’s suspension, Russian media figures and social media users were quick to draw parallels with the Kremlin’s past treatment of comedy shows critical of the authorities. “Americans, don’t just take this sitting down — go protest at the White House. Free speech is your last line of defense,” Russian investigative journalist Roman Dobrokhotov wrote on X. “If you lose it the way we did, you’ll end up in the same place we are!” He added that he protested back in 2001, when the Kremlin took control of the then-independent TV station NTV in part because of its political satire show Kukly (“Puppets”). Meduza looks back at the stories of a few of the Russian TV comedy shows that were taken off the air as the country’s space for free expression steadily shrank.
Kukly (‘Puppets’) (1994–2002)
Inspired by the French show Les Guignols de l’info, Kukly was a staple of 1990s Russian television. Airing weekly on the then-independent network NTV, the program used grotesque puppets of the country’s top celebrities and political figures to parody current events, from terrorist attacks and the wars in Chechnya to President Boris Yeltsin’s alcohol abuse. According to a 2022 retrospective from the independent news site TJournal, Kukly “showed former Soviet citizens that politicians weren’t demigods but ‘public servants,’ and that Russians had the right to look at them under a magnifying glass.”
After Vladimir Putin took office, however, the show didn’t last long. In April 2001, after an extended harassment campaign from the Kremlin that began days after his inauguration, NTV was forcibly taken over by the state-controlled Gazprom-Media. Kukly’s creator, Viktor Shenderovich, left the show after the takeover, and it was pulled off the air in 2003.
Kukly was widely reported to be a “major irritant” to the new Russian president, for whom it pulled no punches. In January 2000, just weeks after Putin became Russia’s acting president, NTV aired an episode of the program depicting him as an evil, muttering baby gnome. Four months later, after his first inauguration, Kukly imagined the year 2020: Putin was still in office and ordering raids on NTV’s parent company. The episode was prophetic but too optimistic: it ended with Putin’s resignation.
Evening Urgant (2012–2022)
The most obvious Russian analogue to Colbert and Kimmel is Ivan Urgant, whose show Evening Urgant was directly inspired by American late-night programs and used their format. During his show’s decade-long run on the country’s flagship state-controlled TV network Channel One, Urgant interviewed all manner of Russian celebrities and politicians (except the president), as well as international stars such as Billie Eilish, Mila Kunis, and even Stephen Colbert himself.
Hosting a late-night show in a steadily autocratizing Russia was a tightrope act. Unlike his counterparts in the U.S., Urgant refrained from directly criticizing the president on his show, instead poking fun at lower-level officials, regional news stories, and viral videos.
However, on the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he posted a black square on Instagram with the caption “Fear and pain. No to war.” His show has been suspended since. In April 2025, Russian state media reported that the country’s Justice Ministry was considering declaring him a “foreign agent.”
In 2025, Urgant launched an international tour in which he performs live around Europe and Asia (not Russia) in a format similar to his former talk show.
Projectorparishilton (2008–2012, 2017)
Before he got his own late-night show, Ivan Urgant was part of the all-star ensemble of comedians hosting the political variety show Projectorparishilton. The four presenters (Urgant, Garik Martirosyan, Sergei Svetlakov, and Alexander Tsekalo) would gather weekly to discuss politics and news (always with a light, humorous tone), answer audience questions, and perform music.
The show was well-regarded; a 2012 Lenta.ru article about the end of its initial run lamented: “These days, it’s not cool to admit you watch TV, but honestly, Projectorparishilton was the exception to that rule.” What made the show work wasn’t its format, but the talent and chemistry of its hosts, whom Channel One CEO Konstantin Ernst once likened to The Beatles. So when two of the hosts signed contracts with another network that barred them from staying on the show, it was inevitably taken off the air.
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According to Lenta.ru’s eulogy, however, the show’s departure may have been for the best, since its commentary no longer seemed so sharp amid the protests that began in late 2011:
Against the backdrop of the past year’s political events, it suddenly became strikingly clear just how toothless the show’s humor really was. While the country’s political life lay dormant, merely mentioning politicians in a comic context seemed fresh and sharp. But once angry citizens woke up, that kind of humor stopped hitting the mark.
In February 2017, Projectorparishilton’s official social media page announced the show would return to air, and multiple new episodes did air later that year. By October 2018, however, it had disappeared from its network’s site. The following year, Sergei Svetlakov addressed the show’s closure in an interview:
Projectorparishilton ended precisely because the format got in our way, and we didn’t want to look like idiots. We don’t cover certain things happening in the country; instead, we joke about a squirrel in Norilsk having a baby. That’s what we end up joking about.
Story by Sam Breazeale