Over its nearly 30-year run, the series about the world’s most famous animated family has alluded to many real-life events long before they’ve actually happened: the Trump presidency, the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, 9/11 and, most recently, Disney’s takeover of Fox. By some accounts, the coincidences — predictions, if you will — number in the 20s, or more.
This track record has led the show’s legion of fans to think that “The Simpsons” is, at the very least, a product of television’s most intelligent writers, and, at the most, prophetic.
So is there something bigger going on?
The future can be forecast better than one might think, said Al Jean, one of the show’s original writers and its showrunner since 1998. Episodes of “The Simpsons” air a year after they’re produced, he said, so “it’s just a sort of frame of mind that we’ve got that we think one year ahead.”
“I predict people will make too much of our great predictions,” he joked.
The show is the product of brilliant minds, many Harvard educated, said William Irwin, whose book “The Simpsons and Philosophy” has for years been taught in college courses at The University of California, Berkeley and other schools. Mr. Irwin is the chairman of philosophy at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
Writers rule on “The Simpsons,” not the actors, he said.
The result is a show packed with references to art, literature, pop culture, politics and science.
“When that many smart people produce a television show, it’s bound to make some startling ‘predictions,’” he said.
Another possible factor at play: “the law of truly large numbers,” a concept presented by the Harvard mathematicians Frederick Mosteller and Persi Diaconis in their 1989 paper Methods for Studying Coincidences.
“With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is apt to happen,” the law states. “The Simpsons,” a Fox show, is the longest-running scripted TV series in history.
Or, for fans looking for answers far outside conventional logic, Dr. Bernard Beitman, author of “Connecting With Coincidence,” offers the existence of the “psychosphere,” our mental atmosphere that is essentially “group mind in action.”
“Under the right conditions, we can know things that we don’t know we know, and we can sometimes predict events or attract what we are thinking,” said Dr. Beitman, a former chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Missouri.
Or, for fans looking for answers far outside conventional logic, Dr. Bernard Beitman, author of “Connecting With Coincidence,” offers the existence of the “psychosphere,” our mental atmosphere that is essentially “group mind in action.”
“Under the right conditions, we can know things that we don’t know we know, and we can sometimes predict events or attract what we are thinking,” said Dr. Beitman, a former chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of Missouri.