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 . But, amazingly, it’s a reality that The Simpsons predicted 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 this would 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.
As expected, headlines around the world connected the story to Black Mirror. And though the porcine-report was never officially confirmed, it’s safe to say that the series, at bare minimum, offered up an accurate prediction of what the fervor around such a grotesque story would look like.
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.
12. Person of Interest and Edward Snowden
These days, forever changed the way many of think about privacy. A year before Snowden’s revelation, though, CBS’s Person of Interest aired an episode that would end up becoming far more true-to-life than the series’ creators might have imagined.
“No Good Deed” centered around Henry Peck, a young and extremely paranoid professional who, it turns out, is secretly a Natural Security Agency spy. Peck learns about his employer’s massive surveillance program and, well, you know… does exactly what Snowden did roughly a year later. It’s highly unlikely that Person of Interest’s creative team had any sort of knowledge of the agency’s inner-workings -- they were just trying to tell an exciting story. It just goes to show that these days, truth can really be just as dramatic as fiction.
11. The Chris Rock Show and O.J. Simpson’s Tell-All
Chris Rock has never had an issue with boundary-pushing comedy. In fact, he’s made a career out of it. If he hadn’t made it big as an actor and stand-up performer, though, he might have had another career option on the table: professional psychic.
A 1999 episode of his HBO series, The Chris Rock Show, featured an especially humorous skit in which he fondly recalled a (fictional) visit he’d had from OJ Simpson. According to Rock, the former football player dropped by his show to promote his new instructional video: I Didn’t Kill My Wife… But If I Did, Here’s How I Did It. At the time, it was pretty funny; but eight years later, the public learned that Simpson was making plans to release a memoir, titled If I Did It. Chris Rock gets major points for not only knowing Simpson had a predisposition towards poorly-conceived self-promotion, but absolutely nailing the lack of tact that the fallen star would one day display.
10. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Google Glass
Jem’Hadar and Vorta to communicate and get an up-close, enhanced glimpse at the world just outside their spacecraft. Eighteen years later, DS9 fans noticed that a recently announced and much-hyped Google product bore an uncanny resemblance to the sci-fi series’ virtual display technology.
Google Glass hit the market in 2015, and was promoted as being an exciting way to integrate digital technology and information into our everyday lives. The product itself was perhaps a bit too futuristic, and ended up being a bust. The tech behemoth has pulled it for now while they reassess its purpose, but we’re guessing they’re just waiting until they can reintroduce it once we’ve expanded their empire into space.
9. Spooks and the 7/7 Bombings
This series (known stateside as MI-5) aired from 2002 to 2011, and was popular due to its thrilling look at the inner workings of England’s military intelligence. It also ended up producing a frighteningly predictive storyline about a violent attack.
One of the series’ fourth season storylines followed the MI-5 team as they worked against the clock to prevent a terror cell from bombing central London, including iconic locations like King’s Cross station. The episode was filmed in the spring of 2005, several weeks before a series of bombings hit the city on July 7, 2005. Once the dust had settled, it was clear to the series’ creators that the story they’d crafted -- complete with references to King’s Cross and other recently attacked locations -- had become a tragic reality. The BBC ultimately aired the Spooks episodes unedited in September, complete with a disclaimer about the violence and its similarity to real-world events.
8. Scrubs and Osama Bin Laden’s Hideout
Not that long ago, Osama Bin Laden was the most wanted man in the world. Government operatives across the globe searched far and wide for the al-Qaeda leader, but it took them nearly a decade to track him down. Apparently, they all would have saved some time if they’d been watching Scrubs, NBC’s quirky hospital-themed comedy series best known for its irreverent comedy and sometimes off-color jokes.
In a 2006 episode, “His Story IV,” J.D. bones up on the facts about the war in Iraq in order to impress his friends. When no one else wants to discuss current events with him, though, the janitor steps in and remarks that they should be looking for Bin Laden in Pakistan. Sure, he didn’t exactly throw out the man’s coordinates, but it also wasn’t exactly the most likely place for the terror leader to be hiding. In 2011, U.S. forces finally tracked Bin Laden down -- and he was, just as the janitor predicted, in Pakistan. Maybe J.D.'s longtime nemesis took a quick sabbatical from Sacred Heart to drop some knowledge on Seal Team Six?
7. Star Trek and the Moon Landing
In so many ways, Star Trek was one of the foremost pioneering TV series of the 20th century. It was diverse, tech-friendly, and always had an eye to the future. Once or twice, it was so in tune with the world’s future state that it accidentally spoiled the USA’s lunar landing.
A 1967 episode, entitled “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” found the Enterprise crew traveling back in time, where their ship is mistaken for a UFO. At one point in the episode, Uhura picks up a distant radio frequency from NASA, which mentions something about a manned mission to the moon getting ready to depart Cape Kennedy that Wednesday. It just so happens that two years later, Apollo 11 -- the manned NASA mission that would later land on the moon -- departed from that very same port on a Wednesday.
Now, many of these details would have been fairly easy for Star Trek’s writers to deduce. Space, the final frontier, was a hot topic across the world at that time, and Cape Kennedy was a well-known NASA hub. The episode never explicitly states that the Enterprise’s crew landed in 1969, either, though eagle-eyed fans have deduced, based on the series’ timeline, that they likely did. So, ultimately, while it may not be that big of a coup for a sci-fi series like Star Trek to guess the year we’d land on the moon, we gotta give them credit for getting it right, anyway.
6. Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and ‘80s Politics
With its psychedelic set dressings and current-event focused sketches, this zany comedy series was very focused on the “now” of the late 1960s....except for its tongue-in-cheek events segment, “News of the Future,” of course. Dan Rowan read headlines from the future, and they were often so ridiculous to the show’s studio audience that they would burst into laughter. However, Laugh-In’s segment did get a couple of things right.
In one episode, Rowan announced a bit of news about a President Reagan in the year 1988 -- Ronald Reagan, the former actor turned politician, was most certainly still in the Oval Office that year. A “News of the Future” skit in 1969 also predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years later. Sadly, the obviously psychic Dan Rowan ed away in 1987. Otherwise, we could ask him how today’s political headlines might end up.