‘The Simpsons’ Season 34 will reveal how they predict the future

If you wanna know where the world is heading, fire up “The Simpsons.”

The popular adult cartoon show has predicted wild and detailed world events such as Donald Trump running for president, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Bengals’ 2022 Super Bowl win, Russia invading Ukraine, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and much more.

For decades, viewers have watched and wondered how the show’s writers have consistently predicted the future and, after 33 seasons, we’re finally going to find out.

Showrunner Matt Selman told Deadline that the newest season of the show will finally reveal to fans how they continue to shock viewers by accurately predicting the future.

“We have another crazy conceptual episode that explains how ‘The Simpsons’ [knows] 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,” Selman said.

“The Simpsons” has continued to set records as the longest-running prime-time series, with 728 episodes to date and 98 Emmy nominations and 35 wins.

The series is nominated again this year for Best Animated Program.

“I’m excited about Season 34. It’s probably the best 34th season of any show you’ve ever seen,” Selman joked.

He joined the writing staff of the hit series in 1997 and became a co-showrunner with Al Jean in 2020. Jean has previously shared that he believes the show has been able to continuously predict the future thanks to both luck and the number of episodes produced. 

“One of our writers, the guy whose episode predicted Donald Trump as president, said it best: ‘If you write 700 episodes, and you don’t predict anything, then you’re pretty bad. If you throw enough darts, you’re going to get some bullseyes,” Jean told NME.

Still, he noted that he finds the show’s unintentional 9/11 prediction particularly eerie. 

“The 9/11 one is so bizarre,” said Jean of “The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson.” “In the World Trade Center episode, there was a brochure reading $9 a day with an 11 styled up like the towers. That was in ’96, which was crazy, like this insane coincidence.” 

But other predictions have been more thoughtful. “[Mostly] it’s just educated guesses,” Jean continued. “Stanley Kubrick made the movie ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ in 1968, and there’s Zoom and iPads in it — but that’s because he had futurologists helping him construct what the world might look like in 30 years’ time.”

Jean told fans on Twitter that one of his “educated guesses” was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Very sad to say this was not hard to predict,” Jean tweeted on Feb. 24, the first day of the invasion, in response to an article titled “Did ‘The Simpsons’ ‘Predict’ the Russia-Ukraine Crisis Way Back in 1998?”

“I hate to say it, but I was born in 1961, so 30 years of my life were lived with the specter of the Soviet Union,” Jean elaborated in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter. “So, to me, this is sadly more the norm than it is a prediction. We just figured things were going to go bad.”

The Michigan-born animator continued, “Historical aggression never really goes away, and you have to be super vigilant. In 1998, when this clip aired, it was maybe the zenith of US-Russia relations.”

“But, ever since [Russian President Vladimir] Putin got in, almost everybody has made it clear that he’s a bad guy and bad things are going to happen,” he added.

Fox announced that the new season of “The Simpsons” will premiere Sunday, Sept. 25. Tune in to find out how the rest of the year will turn out.