The Simpsons has become eerily famous for seemingly predicting outlandish events that turned true, from Donald Trump running for president — right down to his famous escalator announcement — to a virus emerging from China that turns our world upside down.
Now Matt Selman, the long-running show’s current executive producer and showrunner, tells Deadline that in an upcoming episode in the show’s 34th season they will let the cat out of the bag.
“We have another crazy conceptual episode that explains how The Simpsons know the future. It’s a conceptual episode with lots of crazy stuff in it, but it does an explanation of how The Simpsons can predict the future.”
Sure, he’s likely being tongue in cheek, though Yeardley Smith, who has voiced Lisa Simpson since the show began airing in 1989, once told ABC that the’s show’s prescience is uncanny.
“Maybe we’re a modern day Nostradamus or Nostradami,” she laughed.
“I’ve sort of joked always that the writers have a crystal ball in the middle of their table in the writer’s room. I mean, if you think about collective consciousness … there actually may be something to that, that’s sort of unexplainable because it seems illogical and it’s a little bit, like, feels like magic.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know!” she laughed.
Smith did have a more grounded reason, however.
“The other thing is that we’ve been on so long. Think of all the things that we’ve also predicted that haven’t come true. We’re all only sort of cottoning onto the things that actually have come true!”
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