Matt Groening Explains The Simpsons Predictions

How does Matt Groening explain the predictions?

Conan O’Brien, who previously wrote for The Simpsons, said people regularly ask how the show's staff managed to predict the future. His usual reaction is to question whether they are serious. They are, apparently, entirely serious.

Groening said some viewers imagine “the wizards” working on the series can see what lies ahead. The reality is less mystical. He described the programme as a “volume business,” with writers constantly proposing scenarios, inventions and absurd political developments.

“You throw out a lot of things,” Groening said. “Maybe you make a joke about, yes, the president in the future will be real estate asshole Donald Trump, and it's just a quick laugh in the room, and then later on it's a chilling omen.”

With hundreds of episodes produced across several decades, the show has had more opportunities than most to accidentally resemble the future. The correct guesses survive online. The incorrect ones remain jokes in old episodes, which was their original job anyway.

Why the show does not get everything right

Groening stressed that the series has also made plenty of predictions that never happened. Those misses receive less attention because they still function as comedy and rarely become viral evidence of supernatural screenwriting.

He credited writer Dan Greaney with the line about Trump becoming president, placing its creation at around 2002 in his recollection. Groening then pointed out that the same imagined future eventually had Lisa serving as president.

“So we don't get everything right,” he said.

That is the secret, then: decades of episodes, thousands of jokes and selective attention from viewers. The writers keep generating possibilities, reality occasionally chooses one, and the internet handles the rest.