ABC has suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! following comments its titular host made during his Monday night monologue about the death of conservative activist and podcaster Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated last week in Utah during a public debate appearance.

The network has pre-empted Kimmel’s show “indefinitely” after Nexstar, which owns 28 ABC affiliate stations across the United States, “said it will pre-empt the series for the immediate future,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

THR adds that there were rumblings that other TV groups were taking issue with Kimmel’s comments and that ABC feared “an affiliate revolt.”

In his monologue during Monday's episode, Kimmel said: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

Andrew Alford, President of Nexstar’s broadcasting division, issued the following statement Wednesday to announce the company’s decision to pre-empt Jimmy Kimmel Live!:

“Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views, or values of the local communities in which we are located. …

Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time, and we have made the difficult decision to preempt his show in an effort to let cooler heads prevail as we move toward the resumption of respectful, constructive dialogue.”

Kimmel’s comments also sparked the ire of Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr, a Trump Administration appointee who suggested on a podcast that the broadcast licenses of ABC and its affiliates could potentially be revoked over the matter.

THR points out that Nexstar’s move to pre-empt Kimmel’s show “comes as the broadcast station is seeking FCC approval for its $6.2 billion mega deal to acquire TEGNA.”

The Kimmel show’s suspension comes on the heels of Comedy Central pulling a planned repeat of a recent South Park episode that parodied Charlie Kirk but that aired before his murder.

Editor's note: The original version of this article mistakenly said Kimmel's comments were made on the Tuesday broadcast. They were made during Monday's episode. We regret the error.

F1 and Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski’s big screen reboot of Miami Vice is revving up with Universal Pictures announcing an August 6, 2027 release date for the film version of the iconic 1980s undercover cop TV series.

Casting is currently underway for a 2026 production start. Miami Vice will be shot in IMAX.

The film is produced by Dylan Clark (The Batman) and Kosinski and written by Dan Gilroy and Eric Singer, based on characters created by Anthony Yerkovich from the series executive produced by Yerkovich and Michael Mann.

Unlike the 2006 feature film adaptation directed by Michael Mann and starring Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell, this Miami Vice movie will be a period piece that Universal says “explores the glamour and corruption of mid-80’s Miami,” the decade when the original NBC TV series aired.

Although Mann’s movie opened well, the costly production ultimately proved a commercial disappointment. Reviews were largely negative at the time, but the film has found newfound appreciation online in the last few years. Rumors of a Miami Vice reboot have been circling since 2014.

Kosinski’s movie is particularly inspired by the series pilot and first season (1984-85). In the pilot, New York City cop Ricardo Tubbs travels down to Miami in search of his brother’s killer and eventually teams up with local undercover detective James “Sonny” Crockett, who’s also after the same drug dealers since they killed his partner.

A recurring villain in the first season was Columbian cartel lord Esteban Calderone, whose drug trafficking operations stretched from New York City to Miami and into the Bahamas. He first appeared in the pilot episode, “Brother’s Keeper”, and returned later in the season when an undercover Crockett and Tubbs went to the Bahamas to finally stop Calderone. John Leguizamo later appeared on the series as Calderone’s vengeful son.

Although the show was episodic, the hunt for Calderone was a main throughline of the first season so it stands to reason that might also serve as the spine of Kosinski’s film. Even Mann’s film borrowed a good portion of its plot from the show’s first season, particularly the “Smuggler’s Blues” episode.

“The big-screen version of Miami Vice is in a no-win scenario. Purists will decry its variations from the 1980's TV series that inspired it,” I wrote in my Miami Vice review from 2006. “Those wanting a nostalgia trip will be denied it. Viewers expecting a big, bombastic Bad Boys or Fast and the Furious-style romp will also come away disappointed. Fans of writer-director Michael Mann, as well as those who love their cop movies dark and gritty, will respond favorably to the movie, which is nothing short of a di-Vice-ive affair. You will either love it or loathe it.”

Who do you want to see play Crockett and Tubbs in Kosinski’s Miami Vice movie? Let us know in the comments.

Netflix’s forthcoming animated series Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Deathwatch draws from the lore established by Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell games and their canonical ancillary material to tell a new story about an older Sam Fisher (voiced by Liev Schreiber). As revealed in the exclusive new trailer below, this elder version of Sam is living as a recluse in rural Eastern Europe when he’s pulled back into the black-ops trade.

Netflix hired Derek Kolstad, the creator of John Wick and Nobody, to serve as the series’ showrunner. Although he admits that he played the games and “sucked,” Kolstad is a huge fan of the character of Sam Fisher and of the books by the late author Tom Clancy, who, although he didn’t write any of them, endorsed a series of Splinter Cell tie-in novels.

I recently chatted with Derek Kolstad about what convinced him to do the Netflix series. “They let me do Old Man Sam and to actually use everything in the video games and all the ancillaries as his past resume as canon. That one to me was fun,” Kolstad said. This allowed him to craft an original story that nevertheless “respects the games that I loved and the character I just adored.”

So is Splinter Cell: Deathwatch, which is set decades after the events of the original games, itself to be considered canon? Kolstad isn’t entirely certain but told IGN, “I hope so. … [Ubisoft’s] got a stranglehold on their IP for good measure because they’ve got some of the best titles. But there were some things that along the way [they] were like, ‘Don't do that.’ And I'm like, ‘Why?’ And they're like, ‘Hey, we got other plans.’ Again, I only get to peer behind part of the curtain for what they're thinking [of for the] long run. But for what I want to do with the anime and talking in the future of any other spinoff they want to do, it's going like, ‘This fits the mold.’”

Watch the exclusive new trailer for Splinter Cell: Deathwatch below:

An older, once-notorious badass now living a quiet life is a concept Kolstad is quite familiar with, having used it to great effect in his scripts for the original John Wick and 2021’s Nobody. Kolstad acknowledged the parallel to those works but added that he “had the flexibility to go where I wanted to go with (Sam). And it's been done before in Old Mad Logan, but in many respects, this is my Unforgiven. This is the ‘one last job’ from the old '70s thrillers, and it was a joy, man.”

Some Splinter Cell fans may be disappointed that Michael Ironside, who voiced Sam Fisher in the games, isn’t reprising the role for Deathwatch, especially since Sam is meant to be older in the show. “I loved him, but ultimately it was like, ‘If we're going to be doing this for a while, they just wanted a new sound.’ And when they were going through the various voices, any number of people were up for the role,” Kolstad said.

The showrunner is particularly fond of Liev Schreiber’s performance in the 2002 spy thriller The Sum of All Fears, which is what made him “perfect” to succeed Ironside in the role of Sam Fisher: “Say what you will about that movie, but Liev Schreiber as John Clark was perfect. And so when his name came up, it was looking through that lens of John Clark. It's again, they’re both Clancy characters, they're attached to the hip, same creator, same universe, and it just seemed perfect.”

Splinter Cell: Deathwatch revisits some of the events depicted in the 2005 game Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, with flashbacks recounting the close friendship and later tragic falling-out between Sam and his former comrade-in-arms, Douglas Shetland.

“Even though we have elements of that game referenced there, it's hopefully small enough and the changes therein minute enough [that fans won’t be upset],” Kolstad said.

“But the other thing you have to look at with an adaptation, especially when it's the first time in this medium, you have to rip the spine out of the source material,” he continued. “Keep the brain and the heart, entertain the soul, and do your best to actually build it into something that works.”

Check out this exclusive new poster for Splinter Cell: Deathwatch.

In the show’s present day storyline, Shetland’s children – half-siblings Diana and Charlie – now control their late father’s infamous company, Displace International. Diana has retooled Displace into a green energy firm with global ties; Charlie is a ne’er-do-well who yearns for a larger role and to emerge from out of Diana’s shadow.

What Displace and the Shetland offspring are really up to drives the larger plot of Splinter Cell: Deathwatch. It’s why Sam gets reactivated as an operative for the clandestine unit Fourth Echelon, coming to the aid of a younger agent, Zinnia McKenna, who has been wounded while on a mission. Along with his old tech support colleague Anna Grimsdottir and her fellow Fourth Echelon members Jo and Thunder, Sam and Zinnia uncover a larger conspiracy involving Displace that threatens Europe.

With Sam now ostensibly a retiree, Kolstad’s approach to the character is reflective of his understanding of the psychology of real-life veterans. “You talk to Special Forces and first responders and anyone in this kind of game, you get into your late 30s, you're the old man,” Kolstad explained. “So when you talk about what is the thing with a well-trained soldier, it's tears in training, it's laughing in the field. Because you think in the field you're going to die, it's better than what they did back in training. And I think when (Sam) is actually used as the scalpel he was forged to be, [it pleases him because] we all like feeling useful, man.”

Similarly, the Fourth Echelon of Deathwatch is also grappling with being “analog in a digital world,” as Kolstad put it. “I think it's there in the same place that Sam is, where it's like they're about to be mothballed. Or in a digital era, why do we need boots on the ground?” Kolstad said.

“Do I have a place in this world? And ultimately they do, because they are the point of the spear. You still need that guy to push the button, and they're the ones to push the button.”

You can push the button – the play button, that is – to see Sam Fisher return to his stealthy ways when Splinter Cell: Deathwatch launches on Netflix on October 14.