Celebrity friendships can feel random. That’s because, sometimes, they kind of are. They often involve two people who meet because of incredibly specific circumstances. They were lucky enough to work on the same big project. There was a difficult location shoot that saw them essentially stranded in a strange local for several months. They could go through whatever the hell Jack McBrayer and Alexander Skarsgard have gone through to find themselves attached at the hip. Then, there are some cases when a celebrity does everything in their newfound power to become friends with another celebrity.
Jimmy Kimmel has been a fan of Huey Lewis and the News for a long time. When I was in High School, I purchased a Huey Lewis and The News Greatest Hits CD and Kimmel wrote the forward. In it, he told a story about his childhood friend and current band leader, Cleto Escobedo III, stealing a carton of cassette tapes from a boat. Among those cassettes, they found Picture This, the band’s second album. Kimmel has been a fan ever since. Once he became a big name in entertainment, he sought out a friendship with Lewis and it worked!
The two are thick as thieves. They go fishing together. Kimmel interviews Lewis quite frequently. Lewis’s son even worked (still works?) on Kimmel’s late-night show. In what would likely be a shock to young Jimmy, he and Huey Lewis are best buds. It’s the kind of celebrity relationship that I’m honestly a little jealous of. It’s not even that there’s another celebrity I’d like to be friends with. I am specifically jealous that Kimmel is friends with Huey Lewis. That jealousy is only growing with their newly announced project.
Lewis will star in and produce a half-hour mockumentary show currently titled Whatever Happened To Huey Lewis? Huey will play a fictionalized version of himself dealing with his very real ailment. The Heart And Soul singer has experienced hearing loss since being diagnosed with Ménière’s disease in 2018. It will tackle how he has lived his life since. Deadline reports that on the show he will navigate his new life “With the help of his codependent family and eccentric celebrity friends.”
The show will be written and executive-produced by Only Murders In the Building scribe Kirker Butler. Kimmel will also be a producer, which leads me to guess that he will also appear as one of Lewis’s “eccentric celebrity friends.” I’m in for this show, hook, line, and sinker. I don’t know if the idea is good. It hasn’t started shooting, so there is still a long way to go. Still, like Kimmel, I am a huge Huey fan and will take any opportunity to get more of him in my life. I may not have a late-night show and/or his personal phone number, but I’ll take what I can get.