Everybody loves those videos about unlikely animal friends, where a dog and a cat help each other steal food off of a table, or a monkey and a pig climb a tree, or a lion dances on a log with a warthog and a meerkat (though that might be a different kind of a movie). Well, now we have a new duo of unlikely animal friends, except these unlikely animal friends happen to both be people: Conan O’Brien and former NBC head Jeff Zucker.
For those who don’t keep up with recent TV history, Zucker is the guy who fired Conan when he, essentially, refused to move his Tonight Show back a timeslot to make room for The Jay Leno Show—a garbage program that everyone hated. Coco walked away with $32 million and eventually landed the Conan show on TBS. Zucker was eventually kicked out of NBC for turning it into a garbage network that everyone hates, and he has since taken over CNN—which is currently a news network that everyone tolerates, so he still has some work to do.
So it would stand to reason that there might be some Taylor Swift-style bad blood between Conan and Zucker, but according to The Hollywood Reporter, the pair recently managed to “stun onlookers” by “briefly and cordially” having a conversation during upfronts earlier this month. Apparently, Conan initiated this brief and cordial conversation, and when he returned to the stunned onlookers among his team “minutes later,” he gave them “a ‘life’s too short’ shrug.”
Of course, since Conan did take enough money from NBC to keep his pompadour orange and healthy for another century or two, burying the hatchet probably wasn’t as hard as some people might think. $32 million and five years can make a lot of things pretty easy.