Bill Burr didn’t curse on Jimmy Kimmel Live Wednesday night. His movie did, and nobody at ABC caught it in time.
The comedian stopped by to promote The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin‘s companion film to The Social Network, and the show rolled a clip during his sit-down. In it, Burr’s character Charlie warns Jeremy Strong‘s older version of Mark Zuckerberg about unchecked misinformation: “The firehose of bad information you’re injecting into the air supply is becoming jet-powered. It’s hydraulic. Harm, I promise you, is f***ing imminent.” The line aired uncensored on the East Coast broadcast.
Jimmy Kimmel Live tapes in the late afternoon specifically so ABC’s standards and practices team has time to catch language like this before airtime. How the word got through is unclear, and it isn’t the show’s first time with this exact problem. Kimmel reportedly stopped broadcasting truly live a year into its run after censors couldn’t keep pace with actor Thomas Jane‘s cursing, which is why the show shifted to same-day taping in the first place.
The timing could have looked bad given FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s ongoing scrutiny of Kimmel and ABC. But the network isn’t at risk here. Kimmel airs during the FCC’s 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. “safe harbor” window, when profane language is legally permitted on broadcast television even though networks typically bleep it out anyway as a matter of their own house standards. By the time the segment reached YouTube later that night, the line had been bleeped after all.
Burr seemed unbothered by any of it during the actual interview, more focused on how much the role meant to him. He told Kimmel he read the entire 145-page script in one sitting, calling it “the best thing I had ever been sent” since his stretch on Breaking Bad convinced him to keep chasing dramatic roles. He plays a member of Zuckerberg’s legal team in the film, which Burr described as “more a companion piece” than a sequel to the 2010 original, following a young Facebook engineer, played by Mikey Madison, who teams up with a Wall Street Journal reporter, played by Jeremy Allen White, to expose the company’s internal secrets.
The Social Reckoning hits theaters October 9, giving Burr a genuine dramatic showcase to go with his standup dates, which continue this fall in New Orleans, Chicago and Mesa, Arizona. The uncensored clip will probably be searched out online and likely end up creating a little more buzz. Even when things go slightly off script it can have a positive outcome (as long as there’s no, well, reckoning).
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