The INSIDER Summary:
• These shows were on the money.
In many ways, both big and small, television is in the business of selling us the future. Whenever you flip the channels, you’re likely to find a range of fortune tellers — infomercial psychics that swear they can see all, and cable news pollsters that try to predict the outcome of everything from a horse race to the presidential election. Most of the time, they’re not right, but sometimes, TV can be pretty freaking accurate when it tries to guess what’s going to come next.
For the past few decades, in fact, there have been several series that have accidentally predicted future events. From forecasting the fates of world leaders to imagining public figures and the scandals that befall them, these comedy and drama series have done a fantastic job of reading in between cultural lines and figuring out where we’re heading. Here are 15 Times That TV Predicted The Future.
15. The Simpsons and President Trump
President Trump. It’s an idea that many Americans never thought would come to pass. But, amazingly, it’s a reality that The Simpsonspredicted years ago. In the 2000 episode “Bart to the Future,” Bart gets a chance to see into his future, and learns that he is, predictably, kind of a deadbeat. His perpetually motivated sister Lisa, though, is a pretty big deal. In fact, she’s getting ready to take the reigns as the first (straight) female POTUS.
Her predecessor? One Donald J. Trump, who left her with some pretty ugly budget issues to clean up. It’s not the first time that Matt Groener’s iconic series has predicted the future, and it likely won’t be the last. After all, the President-elect has never been shy about his political aspirations. But 16 years ago, who would have thought that thiswould be one of the predictions that The Simpsons got right?
14. Black Mirror And David Cameron's Pig Thing
This spectacular but sobering British sci-fi series seems to have only one goal: to make us hyper-aware of our reliance on technology and its power to do harm. Despite this overarching theme, the first episode of Black Mirror provided a rather stark view, not just of technology, but of the politics of public opinion.
One of the very best entries of the entire series, “The National Anthem” follows a fictional prime minister who, in order to save a member of the Royal family from kidnappers, has to get intimate with a pig on national television. When the episode first aired in 2011, it seemed like a clever commentary on our international obsession with scandal and the 24-hour news cycle. Then, a tell-all biography of England’s then-Prime Minister David Cameron hit bookstores, and revealed that he may have actually done unspeakable things to a swine in his college years.
13. The Lone Gunmen and 9/11
In the spring of 2001, The Lone Gunmen was doing its best to be the go-to show for America’s next generation of highly suspicious patriots. Though the X-Files spin-off only lasted a few months, it did manage to leave a pretty chilling legacy — that’s because its pilot more or less forecasted certain aspects of the September 11th terrorist attacks.
The episode followed Byers, Frohike and Langley as they tried to prevent a government-sanctioned attack designed to boost gun sales across the country. The conspiracy in question would involve someone flying a plane into the World Trade Center. The Lone Gunman first aired in March 2001, and there’s truly no way that the series’ creators could have known that its viewers would see something similar, but far more terrifying, just six months later. To this day, though, it seems almost impossible that a series intended to up the ante on good, clean, paranoid fun could unwittingly predict such a horrific tragedy.
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