Three TV Predictions That Are Now True

We are now 20 minutes into the future, next Sunday AD

The future is now (Source: Piqsels)

Amidst the copious hand-wringing, recriminations, and generalized anxiety about the state of the world today, I’ve been remembering three specific TV shows from years past. They made an impression on me then, and over the years I’ve been increasingly impressed by the value of their predictions. I present to you Three Prophets of Doom, who correctly predicted events we face now, arranged in the order of dark, really dark, then so dark you can’t see anymore.

Joel

(Source: Best Brains, Inc., fair use)

There was a time when there were corners of the media landscape in which creativity was allowed. One such tiny corner was Minnesota’s KTMA-TV 23, one of those low-wattage UHF stations that still retained independence from the corporate media conglomerates.

In that tiny corner of KTMA, in 1988, a guy named Joel Hodgson had the opportunity to create Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K), an immediate cult classic in Minnesota (the young me was there) that quickly became a cult classic nationwide. Hodgson and a team of writers took the trope of mocking bad B movies (Elvira, Svengoolie, et…