NEW YORK (NYTimes) - There is no crystal ball in The Simpsons writers' room, but you would be forgiven for wondering.
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 have actually happened: the Trump presidency, 9/11 and, most recently, Disney's takeover of Fox.
By some accounts, the coincidences number in the 20s, or more.
This track record has led 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 are produced, he added, so "it's just a sort of frame of mind that we've got that we think one year ahead".
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.
Writers rule on the show, not the actors, he noted. 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 Diaconisin 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.
