The Emmy Nominated short form series “The Rabbit Hole with Jimmy Kimmel” has one objective: becoming the #1 basement conspiracy video podcast the “government” does not want you to see.
The idea behind Rabbit Hole is to satirize the conspiracy podcast culture that has become so pervasively influential on social media. An idea that feels particularly timely, in this era where even the president of The United States parrots whatever baseless theory is tweeted at him. The goal of Rabbit Hole is parodying these conspiracy goofballs, by showing how easy it is to weave completely nonsensical theories from an absurd premise. The trick behind every conspiracy is assigning tremendous meaning to small and insignificant details, and that’s how comedy works as well, making it a perfect vehicle for parody. The series proves that you can “do your own research” about virtually any stupid idea and the results will be ridiculous and hilarious and leave viewers nearly convinced that it could be true.
To weave absurd nonsense conspiracies, first requires an absurd amount of research. Each script takes writer, Jesse Joyce, several days, starting with ridiculous premises like – Is Donald Trump a Time Traveler? or Could 5G stand for Five Guys? From there, the investigation branches out in every direction looking for random, coincidental connective tissue that, when woven together, sound like everything’s intentionally connected into one big conspiracy.
One of the greatest challenges in scripting Rabbit Hole episodes is that they never start out with an ending in mind. The trail of “evidence” takes us in whatever direction is funniest, which means, the investigative goose-chases often lead nowhere. There are so many dead ends, or theories that don’t pan out. One example, was an hours-long, futile attempt to find a funny connection using patent numbers. (Ideally, Donald Trump’s prisoner number would match the patent for something like Truck Nutz), but hours of typing in numbers related to Trump, or Mar a Lago, or Hillary Clinton’s birthday, into the US Patent Office website proved fruitless, and the trail was abandoned. In other situations, however, that same level of meticulous research paid off – as in the example of hoping to find a reference to Elon’s “tiny testicles” in the Nixon Watergate tapes – which, after pouring through transcripts, ultimately led to the discovery that Nixon uttered the words “little nuts” – a jackpot for Rabbit Hole.
Once all six scripts are drafted, host, executive producer and co-writer Jimmy Kimmel adds additional jokes and funny conspiracy details, tweaks it for his performance, and they go into production.
Director, Jonathan Kimmel, and producer, Sarah Robe, coordinate with set designers, lighting, props and wardrobe to match the look and feel of these ubiquitous video podcast clips that dominate our social media feeds: A bro-ey, sloppily dressed dude, in a cluttered, dingy man- cave, breathlessly and hyper-seriously overexplaining minutia into a teeny lapel microphone pinched tightly between the fingers.
The editing process is equally labor intensive, between selecting dozens of pieces of music, to manipulating hundreds of photos and video clips presented as “evidence,” editor Jason Bielski, works for weeks to set the frantic, ominous tone of each conspiracy theory. The edit bay was home to numerous back-and-forths with lawyers over whether a “reasonable person” would believe what a stock photo subject is being nonsensically accused of. (like could we imply Corky the Water-Skiing Clown poisoned his audiences throughout the 1960s with chemicals from boat wakes).
The real magic of Rabbit Hole is in the attention to detail. From Jimmy’s pitch-perfect condescending performance, to the frenetic editing, the hours spent researching 400 year old street maps in London for one punchline, to the spooky, cluttered thumbnail designs for placement on social media – where all conspiracies live, to Jimmy’s bleak collection of hoodies and the teeny handheld mic, right down to the neon alien holding a cat, the internet commenters unanimously agree, Rabbit Hole is spot on satire.
“The Rabbit Hole with Jimmy Kimmel” became an immediate viral hit, earning a 2025 Emmy Nomination for Best Short Form Series, and garnering over 29.7 million views across social media platforms. The episode titled “Windmills” has risen to become one of the top 10 all-time most watched TikToks on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! account, while “Boat Wakes” sits in the top 10 most watched JKL Facebook reels for 2025. The uniqueness, and success of Rabbit Hole has led publications like LateNighter to praise the series as “equal parts funny and amazing” and Deadline to deem it “wild” and “meticulously researched.” But most importantly, Rabbit Hole continues to amuse the small group of us who work on it, as a fun, hilarious and effective way to lampoon the current nonsensical conspiracy podcast driven times we’re living through.
