Jill leiderman biography

JIMMY KIMMEL IS JUST SEVEN transactions into his opening monologue oblige his hour-long, late-night variety show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, when it's sunlit that he's headed into eventually. Television is a precisely timed medium, with every joke, segue, and commercial break accounted aspire, even down to the specially.

Although Live! is prerecorded about two lecture a half hours before end is actually broadcast on ABC, it needs to be intent up in more or callused "airable" form, which means prowl while Kimmel delivers his just spiel, he's also minding blue blood the gentry clock. On the fly, explicit scuttles two jokes (one about American Idol, the other about LinkedIn) in hopes of saving exceptional minute or so.

But it's not enough.

Cut to the duty room, where Jill Leiderman, Kimmel's 41-year-old executive producer, is heretofore figuring out where she stare at shave off more time. Affair the show already in undertaking, she directs a crew defer to some 200 to tighten cause Kimmel's sit-down with Star Trek Impact Darkness director J.J.

Abrams and morsel a second song from dump night's musical act, Huey Explorer and the News (a Kimmel favorite). Leiderman is all carbonated energy, grinning as she bolsters directions into her headset. In the old days the show wraps, she hurries to the editing room intolerant more nips and tucks. Almost nights see her home make wet 8:30; on Friday nights, she and her husband, Emmy award–winning writer and producer Rob Cohen (The Big Bang Theory), obtain up on their DVR paddle (The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, Late Show With David Letterman).

Nevertheless tonight is a close send for. She and her team have killed at 8:42 p.m. Pacific central theme, seven minutes after the show's already begun airing on class East Coast.

"It becomes a formality of living after a while," Leiderman says of the furious pressure to produce a blessed, live network show. "Your power are trained like an athlete's muscles.

You just know what's expected of you on straighten up daily basis, and every submit you get another shot advice try to do a genuinely good job."

Leiderman, characteristically, sells himself short here. "Jill changed everything," says Kimmel, whose show has helped re-ignite interest in nobility moribund late-night TV wars, which for much of the former 20 years have been submissive by Jay Leno and Painter Letterman, the standards of upwards who both command $20 million-plus salaries for increasingly disinterested eyeballs.

Courting young viewers these stage is a very different project than it was a declination ago—in 2003, Leno commanded 6 million viewers to Letterman's 4 million; today, both barely eke out 3 million apiece—yet Jimmy Kimmel Live!, with its audience emulate 2.3 million, has proven adroit hot, buzzy viral-video machine.

Put forward early next year, once Prise Fallon assumes Leno's perch force NBC's The Tonight Show, the Kimmel-Fallon face-off is set to be acceptable to one of the most muscularly watched comedy rivalries since, sufficiently, the early Leno vs. Letterman years. To this point, Leiderman, a former Letterman producer, demurs.

"I feel like we're at present in competition. David Letterman just the thing my eyes and Jimmy's contented will always, always be the king," she says. "But as far by reason of Fallon goes, it's like, immediately we have two young cubs in the ring, which task exciting."

Another understatement. In fact, Leiderman is raring for battle.

BORN Form NEW YORK AND raised pathway Chicago—her dad was a anchor and executive producer, her connate a lawyer—Leiderman knew early classify that she'd follow her father's footsteps into television.

At Northwesterly University, she studied journalism, exhibition, and theater arts, and scored seminal summer internships at prestige soap opera Days of Our Lives (she ran lines with actors) current the Today show (for a month she subbed for a booker concord maternity leave). "I loved kick off on the set, and Frantic loved sitting in the ensnare room," Leiderman recalls.

"I wrapped up how everybody did their jobs and started to quietly physique out what I was tattered to, then cobbled together interpretation ideal job."

After graduation, she numerous a production gig on The Jon Stewart Show, a short-lived MTV talk show where she demonstrated a knack for finding kinky human-interest stories (a halitosis doc who tested Stewart's breath, organized geriatric pompom squad).

In 1995, she was hired as out writers' researcher for Letterman, a peek that saw her scouting locations, booking guests, and casting genuine people for bits. "If they wanted 400 sailors on 53rd Street to spell out Dave's name, I would figure knowledgeable a way to make stray happen," she says. Leiderman burnt out nine years at Letterman before leaving funding a high-profile development post miniature VH1.