Jimmy Kimmel's Who Wants to be a Millionaire 20th-anniversary special scrambled to film without a studio audience amid coronavirus shutdowns

TV Guide

Kimmel got former Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg to fill in for him on Jimmy Kimmel Live! as he taped the Millionaire special in the days before California announced a stay-at-home order. The star-studded Millionaire special kicks off tonight. “We moved really fast,” says executive producer Michael Davies. “We accelerated the schedule and delivered more than eight episodes worth of material by the end of our second shooting day, so we were able to cancel our third shooting day. That was to allow some of our crew and staff, who had traveled from the East Coast, and some of them from the U.K., to get on planes and get home to their families.” Without a studio audience, about 15 staff and crew members had to provide reactions from around the Millionaire set. “Initially that was very concerning to me, because you’re a comedian and you want to get laughs,” says Kimmel. “But about 10 minutes in, I could see that it was gonna work anyway. I did radio for a long time, and when you’re alone in a radio studio, nobody’s laughing. You just have to have some kind of confidence that what you’re saying will be funny to people watching at home. Otherwise, you wind up tap dancing and stumbling, so I kind of went with the drama and kept the jokes between myself and the players. And I think it came out well.”