Let Jiminy Glick moderate the debates! This was a popular sentiment online leading up to and following last night’s disastrous presidential Alien vs. Predator event on CNN. The infamously inept interviewer character was top of mind as his creator, Martin Short , guest hosted Jimmy Kimmel Live! this week, filming pre-taped interview segments with Bill Hader and Sean Hayes and “taking over” for Short to host an entire episode on Thursday.
Watching Hader laugh uncontrollably as Glick asks him what Lorne Michaels smells like (Glick’s theory: “a combination of chicken piccata and silver dollars”) , you realize that getting interviewed by Glick must be a harder, more tear-inducing, more rewarding endurance test for a celebrity than eating even the hottest of wings. It’s a genuine delight. To learn how this late-night team pulled off this triumphant return of Glick, we spoke with Jimmy Kimmel Live! co–head writer and supervising producer Danny Ricker.
What was the conversation like with Martin Short about bringing Jiminy Glick back? We started discussions pretty early on about what we wanted to do for the week, and he had floated the idea of Glick to us. We’re all such massive fans of the character, so the idea of him doing anything as Jiminy Glick on the show was very exciting to me, and to our whole writing staff and our producers. He goes, “I’ll do a couple of pre-taped interviews, and we can sprinkle them throughout the week.
” Then he mentioned the possib.
