TV writers have one job: to entertain. Even when they try to reflect the real world, it's still intended as fictional. They're certainly not trying to give us a glimpse into the future—well, not intentionally anyway. But just as they say if you put a hundred monkeys into a room with typewriters and one of them will eventually write a Shakespearean sonnet, the same can be said about TV scribes and their prophetic powers.
That's right: 99 percent of the time, when screenwriters write about the wonders (and absurdities) of tomorrow, they don't even come close to getting it right. But then there's that elusive one percent, when they somehow see where we're collectively heading with staggering clarity. Even Nostradamus didn't have such an impressive track record for forecasting the future. Here are 25 such examples, when TV shows—from political dramas to cartoons to sci-fi classics—imagined world events and new technology that seemed too fantastical to be believed, and yet somehow came to pass.
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Star Trek2 |
The Simpsons3 | Parks And Recreation predicts the Cubs' World Series win
There used to be two ways to demonstrate that a TV show was set in an improbable future. One was with an African-American president—which, pre-Obama, if you'll remember, seemed like a fairy tale—and the other was by having the Chicago Cubs win a World Series. Parks and Recreation took the latter approach during their final season in 2015, when Tom (Aziz Ansari) and Andy (Chris Pratt) visit Chicago, at some point in the near future, and are told that everyone in the city is "in a really great mood now because of the Cubs winning the series." Sure enough, just one year later, the Cubbies broke their 108-year losing streak and finally took home the Commissioner's Trophy.
4 | Max Headroom predicts Internet advertising and 4Chan
How could a show made in the '80s so accurately predict so many things about the modern digital age, decades before the Internet became anything the mainstream was even aware existed? We always thought Max Headroom was just a talking head used to shill New Coke ("C-c-c-catch the wave!"), but as it turns out, the show was also giving hints about a future in which we're bombarded with Internet advertising, where even terrorists become reality stars, and a new crime empire would be built in virtual spaces like 4Chan.
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The Six Million Dollar Man6 |
The Thunderbirds7 |
Friends8 |
Laugh-In9 |
Black Mirror10 |
Arrested Development11 |
The Jetsons12 |
Quantum Leap13 |
Spooks14 |
Breaking Bad15 |
Scrubs16 |
Family Guy17 |
Scandal18 |
The Chris Rock Show19 |
The Lone Gunmen20 |
Mr. Robot21 | Monty Python predicts furries
John Cleese and the other members of Monty Python were more than happy to make fools of themselves for the amusement of audiences, dreaming up increasingly ridiculous premises that would never, ever exist in real life. Take this sketch from the second ever episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, which took on "The Mouse Problem," a (fictional) phenomenon in which men dressed up as mice and went to parties to eat cheese and squeak.
As a psychologist asks at one point, "How many of us can honestly say that at one time or another he hasn't felt sexually attracted to mice? I know I have." It must've seemed absurd in 1969, when the sketch first aired, but maybe not so much in 2018, where the "furry" subculture, in which people dress up like anthropomorphic animals, is something that even gets discussed on the National Geographic channel.
