Tuned In

Jimmy Kimmel Live, on His Macbook

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1rRGUTB6OY]

Yesterday, a power outage knocked out the cameras just before a taping of Jimmy Kimmel Live. Faced with canceling the taping, Kimmel instead did what you or I have done when we’ve needed quick video of something—grabbed the nearest thing with a camera on it. In this case, his Apple laptop, on which he recorded his entire show.

One thing that makes Kimmel good at his job is that he hasn’t lost touch with the basic, core thrill of doing TV, which is simply: isn’t it cool that I can do something in front of this camera, here, and you can see it, over there. And with laptop awkwardly in hand, he produced an hour of charmingly low-fi TV, basically a Skype session on network television.

Above, you can see a clip from his introduction—I know, you lose so much without seeing it on the big screen—which includes another TV rarity: women in a late-night writers’ room!

After the jump, Kimmel cozies up to Seth Rogen to fit on camera. “If this was Chatroulette,” says Rogen, “we’d both be doing something really gross right now”:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-2nmsmalcw]