'The Simpsons' Predicted Lady Gaga's Very Predictable Super Bowl Halftime Show 5 Years Ago

The Simpsonsdon't predict the future, folks. They make it.

Think about it: 609 episodes over 28 years, countless narratives ranging from classic to complete nonsense. At some point reality had to get stranger than fiction. Which is why I'm rarely surprised when a loose idea from the 300th season of the show eventually seeps into real-life. Most of the time I just figure the subject, intentionally or not, just pulled the idea out of their own internal Simpsons database.

Take for instance, Lady Gaga's Super Bowl 51 performance. Think we can all agree this was hardly a curveball and virtually inevitable. So much the case that Matt Groening & Co. devoted an entire episode to setting up this very likely scenario in a Gaga-assisted episode five years ago. So much the case that the wardrobe resemblance between 2017 in-the-flesh Gaga and 2012 in-the-ink Gaga is uncanny and likely very intentional. And it's not the first time they've incepted these ideas in the fabric of American consciousness. Just look at our current cheeto-in-chief. His presidency was so predictable they called it in 2000.

Keen foresight and political awareness on the part of the show's writers are certainly at play here. But it shouldn't take a PolySci degree or a certificate in pop culture-ism to come up with most of this shit. So let's stop treating The Simpsons like some animated oracles.