A viral video from a July 16 Coldplay concert that showed Astronomer CEO Andy Byron embracing Kristin Cabot, the company’s chief people officer, has been viewed more than 100 million times, spawned an untold number of memes and parodies, and cost Byron his job. It was not, however, predicted in The Simpsons, as some social media users are claiming.
The Simpsons—which began in 1987 as animated short segments on The Tracey Ullman Show and recently wrapped up its 36th season—has a track record of successful “predictions,” mostly jokes that years later resembled a real-life event. Perhaps most notably, in a March 2000 episode, Lisa Simpson is elected president and states, “We inherited quite the budget crunch from President Trump,” a reference to Donald Trump’s brief exploratory presidential campaign under the Reform Party in 2000, which he suspended one month before the episode aired. The show also joked in 1998 that 20th Century Fox would be owned by Disney—which came true 20 years later—and it accurately predicted the winners of the Super Bowl from 1992 to 1994.
However, these coincidences often spur false claims of other events that the show supposedly predicted. The Dispatch Fact Check has previously debunked claims that The Simpsons predicted the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. In other instances, jokes from The Simpsons ultimately become true because of the show’s popularity. For example, when a minor league baseball team moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, fans voted to name the team the “Isotopes,” the same name of The Simpsons’ hometown baseball team, which, in one episode, is nearly relocated to Albuquerque.
Now, internet users are claiming that a past episode of The Simpsons depicted a couple looking shocked after being caught on a Jumbotron. An image in Simpsons-style animation is circulating showing a couple embracing similarly to the original video and with the show’s central characters, including Homer Simpson, in the background.
One TikTok user—under the account name, “The Spilled Tea”—shared the Simpsons-animated image in a video she posted. “Fact, this is a still frame from The Simpsons,” she said. “Fact, this is from season 26. Fact, this is episode 10. Fact, this premiered on January 4, 2015.” She noted that the image was “eerily” similar to the actual photograph taken from the concert, adding, “Please fact check my information. Please, I beg of you, fact check me on this.”
But as Al Jean, one of The Simpsons showrunners, confirmed on X, the image was never featured in an actual episode of The Simpsons.
The episode that aired on January 4, 2015—Episode 10 of Season 26—titled, “The Man Who Came to Be Dinner,” centers around the Simpson family being abducted by aliens while visiting the “Diz-Nee-Land” theme park. The frame being shared online does not match with any of the actual episodes’ still frames.
