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Hilarious In Hindsight / Live-Action TV

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  • In the 3rd Rock from the Sun episode "Dick the Vote", Harry runs for city council. His opponent is played by Al Franken, then best known as "Stuart" from Saturday Night Live, who later became a US Senator from Minnesota.
  • In Season Four of 24, when former president David Palmer was called in to assist the newly-ascended President Logan with managing the current crisis, one of his cabinet members noted that Logan didn't seem very strong and, with that being the case, it was good to know that he was "in good hands". After his time as Palmer ended, Dennis Haysbert became the pitchman for Allstate Insurance Company, which assures its customers that they're in good hands.
  • 30 Rock:
    • In the pilot episode, Tina Fey is ordered to dress up to meet a new actor for the show. Since she dresses casually for her job, she is forced to take a Laura Bush pink suit and put her hair up at the costume/make-up department. She later does a series of sketches for Saturday Night Live as Sarah Palin wearing a strikingly similar outfit and hairstyle.
    • In a first-season episode, Liz and Jenna had this discussion:
      Liz: What are you going to do if they ask you about '08?
      Jenna: Of course, I want Hillary to be the first woman president.
      Liz: Ugh, no. Obama, you support Barack Obama. Remember, you liked those pictures of him at the beach?
      Jenna: Oh, right. Obama. What is he? Hispanic?
      Liz: No he's black.
      Jenna: And he's running for president? Good luck!
    • At the time, the joke was that Jenna was uninformed, but the fact that Obama went on to become a two-term black president makes it even funnier.
    • One episode had Tracy try to market a sandwich maker where the "bread" was actually pieces of meat. Soon enough, KFC made a chicken sandwich where the "bread" was pieces of chicken.
    • In one episode, Jenna states that she starred in a movie now available for the Sega Genesis. While the Genesis was long defunct in most of the world by the time the show began, the writers probably didn't know that it actually was (and still is) going strong in Brazil. The system would also see a few new games outside Brazil for the first time in several decades in 2019.
    • The episode "MILF Island" includes clips from the titular Show Within a Show. In 2022, TLC debuted the reality show MILF Manor, which had a similar, but far less Squick-inducing premise. It then zigzagged back to Freakier Than Fiction when the First-Episode Twist turned out to be that while the male contestants were all of legal age, they were also biologically related to the MILFs.
  • Film critic Mary Pols became pregnant after a casual encounter with a much younger man. She suggested that he live with her to raise the baby, without being in a relationship with her. He rejected the idea because it "sounded like a sitcom". Now Accidentally On Purpose is a sitcom, based on her book but with the father doing exactly what she suggested. This article argues that Platonic Co-Parenting is seeing a surge.
  • In the second Adam-12 episode, "Log 141", a suspected burglar replies to Officer Reed's questioning about the car with the stolen TV in it by saying, "Oh, was there a TV in the back seat? Gee, what won't they think of next? A TV in the back seat!" Technology Marches On, indeed!
  • A recurring gag from the 'Allo 'Allo! has René (played by Gorden Kaye) showing disgust when he realizes that Lt. Gruber (played by Guy Siner) is hitting on him. The kicker? Kaye is homosexual. Siner is not.
  • An episode of America's Funniest Home Videos that originally aired in 2003 featured a clip with host Tom Bergeron narrating, "The Spice Girls are back together...". All five did reunite in 2007-8, as well as in 2012 for the London Olympics closing ceremony.
  • America's Got Talent: On Season 11, contestant and former Eagles player Jon Dorenbos responded to judge Howie Mandel's question "What are you doing here?" on his audition [after Mandel recognized him as a player (at the time) for the Philadelphia Eagles] with "As much as we can achieve, there's always new beginnings and there's always new things to do. So in the off-season I do magic and comedy and stuff." Judge Simon Cowell asked Dorenbos, "This goes well, you win. Then what do you do?" Dorenbos replied, "Let's be honest: the NFL stands for 'Not for long', so I've been lucky here." Dorenbos became a finalist that season and placed 3rd. One year later, Dorenbos had to undergo an emergency open heart surgery after failing a physical when being traded to the New Orleans Saints. Due to the surgery, Dorenbos announced his retirement playing football on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, forcing him to make his hobby of magic a new full-time career. Dorenbos said, "The New Orleans Saints doctor put a stethoscope to my back. I took three breaths and he said, 'You have a heart murmur, but it's not good.' They said, 'Hey we don't really know how to say this, but long story short, you're never playing football ever again and you're going to be in emergency heart surgery pretty quick.'" Dorenbos called his trade a "miracle" for saving his life even naming his new dog Saint after his trade. Ellen told Dorenbos, "Listen, you got free time now, so I want you here [on her show] as much as possible." In a heartwarming moment, his former team the Philadelphia Eagles gave him a Super Bowl ring when the Eagles won Super Bowl LII in 2018.
    • Speaking of Jon Dorenbos, Howie Mandel joked on Twitter about his then-current team the Philadelphia Eagles not making a Super Bowl. Fast forward two years later, they finally win their first Super Bowl in 2018 with Dorenbos receiving an honorary ring.
  • America's Next Top Model: One of the best-known lessons Tyra Banks imparted to her models during the show was how to "smize," that is, smile with your eyes. With the Covid-19 pandemic requiring people to wear masks in public, suddenly the entire populace had to learn how to smize due to the challenge of expressing emotion through the mask.
  • American Horror Story: Cult: During the last couple of episodes, cult leader Kai starts hallucinating Charles Manson, who makes it clear that he's not a Spirit Advisor, since he's still alive in the California State Prison. In real life, Manson would end up dying five days after the show's finale aired.
  • Angel:
    • The message of season 5's "The Girl in Question" rapidly becomes non-serious when additional information is provided by Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8. To explain: in "The Girl in Question," Angel and Spike go to Italy to try and find Buffy (well, to stop a demon war, but that's just an excuse). Each one says they love her; but when they talk with Andrew, they find she's in a relationship with the Immortal, their nemesis. Sort of. Anyway, it all ends with them bonding (again, sort of) over the fact that neither will be with Buffy, who has moved on. In Buffy Season 8, it's revealed that the Buffy involved with the Immortal is a double used so people won't know where the real Buffy is (in Scotland), and Andrew made up her relationship with the Immortal as a practical joke on Angel and Spike.
    • In the first episode Angel runs into Cordelia at a party. After a brief conversation that ends with Cordelia saying that she has to talk to people who actually are someone, Angel comments "Nice to see that she's grown as a person." Funny at the time, but ironic in light of the vast amount of Character Development she would undergo over the course of the series.
      • In that same episode, Cordelia asks if he's still "Grrr". He says "Yeah...there's not actually a cure for that." He finds out later, in "I Will Remember You", that there actually is.
    • In the season 5 episode 19 "Time Bomb", Illyria has this to say to Angel regarding vampires: "Do you know what you were when I was young? You were the muck at our feet. We called you the ooze that eats itself. You were pretty at night. You sparkled, and you stank. You still stink of it!"
  • The second title of used in 1961-1979 for the 1958 to 1979 series called Paul Shannon's Adventure Time becomes more funny given that a cartoon animated series had the exact same name without the Paul Shannon in it
  • Are You Being Served?:
    • Frank Thornton, who played Captain Peacock, later played 'Truly' Truelove in Last of the Summer Wine. Bizarrely, Peacock shared his defining backstory (falsely claiming to have had heroic experiences During the War) with the character that Truelove would replace, Foggy Dewhirst, yet Truelove was a completely different character type.
    • In an early 70s episode, Miss Brahms mentions that her mother has to be held back from attacking the television when Gary Glitter is on Top of the Pops. In light of his later convictions for child pornography.
  • Tony Hale's delivery of the line "Alias is a show about a spy!" on Arrested Development was already hilarious, but it's even better now that he has a recurring role on Chuck, another show about a spy.
  • In the first season of Arrow, there was a scene where Oliver booked DJ Steve Aoki for an event, and mentioned he was able to get him since he used to date Steve's sister. Fast forward to Season 3, where Steve's sister Devon was cast as Katana, before being forced to drop out.
  • The state of Earth in Babylon 5 is often read as a commentary on the Bush government and the many widespread strawmen about the PATRIOT act. Babylon 5 ran from 1994-1998, ending three years before either.
    • The conclusion of the third season episode "A Day in the Strife" is a lot funnier (unintentionally) now than when it originally aired. A mysterious alien probe arrives asking the station questions to see whether it was worthy of the probe revealing some of its own technology, but it is a ruse by which its unknown builders intend to destroy any race advanced enough to pose a threat; Sheridan becomes suspicious of the probe's true nature at the last minute, hesitating whether to send the answers and prompting the following:
      Ivanova: Captain, send or no send?
      • That's a standard military communications protocol, that long predates B5.
    • The Babylon 5 Curse is a humourous way of noting that actors whose bodies were referred to in the script inevitably injured that body part. Claudia Christian fell out of a tree and broke her foot mere hours after reciting the immortal line "I have a very good relationship with my left foot"; Jerry Doyle broke his arm in a fight scene just before recording the scene where the computer asks him if he has a broken arm.
    • Ivanova's lament that the Drazi are "a race that speaks only in macros" is even funnier in the age of web forum image macros.
    • No pun intended here. In order to smuggle his comlink into a room with a mad bomber, Sheridan essentially has to perform an Ass Shove to hide it. It goes well at first until he's made to sit down, causing it to beep and shut off. That's right, Babylon 5 predicted butt-dialing.
    • In one episode Garibaldi vents his frustrations on a bar loudmouth, by slamming the guy's head down on a desk and claiming he is performing a magic trick.
    • The episode "The Quality of Mercy" has one within the episode itself. At the beginning, a Centauri official calls Londo and signs off with "We'll be in touch". When the call disconnects, Londo responds by tapping his chest and muttering "Touch this!" Later in the episode, we learn that Centauri male genitals take the form of tentacles attached at the chest, suggesting that Londo was in fact making an obscene gesture.
  • The final season of Ballers which aired in the late summer of 2019, has Spencer managing to buy the Kansas City Chiefs and talk on resigning star quaterback Patrick Mahomes and other moves to boost up the team. As it happened, 2019 saw the Chiefs go 13-3 and winning their first Super Bowl in 50 years with Mahomes named MVP.
  • One episode of Bargain Hunt had them auctioning off a pair of skis and snowshoes which the auctioneer mocked as only being suitable in the UK if they had a particularly bad winter, the year the episode was recorded later turned out to be the coldest on record and skis and snowshoes would have been a real benefit.
  • Batman (1966):
    • "The Penguin Goes Straight" has Penguin plotting to become Mayor of Gotham for nefarious purposes. Thank God Gotham never falls for that nefarious scheme ever again.
    • During a Season 3 episode Batman reveals a mini-Batphone that for all intents and purposes is similar to a modern cellphone.
    • "The Penguin's A Jinx": After movie star Dawn Robbins comments that Batman could use more publicity, her agent, Mr. Jay, answers:
      "Forget it, Batman never lends himself to commercial enterprises"
    • At the end of "Dizzoner the Penguin", both major parties ask Batman to run for President. He responds to the latter inquiry with "Don't you already have a candidate?" At the time, it was nigh-unthinkable that an incumbent President eligible for another term would not be his party's nominee; however, Lyndon Johnson gave up seeking the 1968 Democratic nomination when it was clear that The Vietnam War had damaged him too badly to win.
  • Before season 3 of Battlestar Galactica, the actress who played Starbuck gave an interview where she jokingly indicated that the big secrets of the upcoming episodes were that "Starbuck is a Cylon and she DIES!" Amusingly, Starbuck did indeed seem to die towards the end of the season, with all involved making a big deal out of the event and with every indication that she wouldn't be back. The real twist came in the season finale, in which Starbuck was revealed to be alive and therefore possibly a Cylon! (but she's not) Amusingly, while Starbuck's departure from the show was made public early, the character's return was kept secret right up until airtime, even from much of the cast.
    • In a season 2 episode, one character remarks sarcastically to another: "Oh, maybe I know [you're not a cylon] because I'm a cylon and I've never seen you at any of the meetings." This line just gets funnier and funnier as the show goes on... And more so funny since the line turned up in the mini-series, spoken by Head Six, which may/may not be a Cylon chip in Baltar's head, talking about a character who is later revealed to be a Cylon at the very in of the miniseries.
  • In 2004, Benedict Cumberbatch portrayed Stephen Hawking (the first person to do so) in the BBC film Hawking. In 2010, he was cast as another English intellect with the initials S.H.: Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock. Cut to 2015's Oscars, featuring Cumberbatch as Alan Turing note  in The Imitation Game, up for Best Actor against Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything - another Hawking biopic.
  • An episode of Better Off Ted focused on the company installing motion sensor technology for all the building's functions... with the downside that it didn't recognize black people, so the black employees had to be followed around by white employees at all times. Now comes news that HP's facial recognition webcam software may not work on black people.
  • At the end of a Beverly Hills, 90210 episode in which Andrea tries to get the school to distribute condoms, she says, "If I never hear the word 'condom' again, it'll be too soon." Maybe that explains why Andrea is the first one in the gang to have an unplanned pregnancy two seasons later.
  • The Big Bang Theory:
    • In the second season Howard has designed a toilet for the International Space Station. He discovers that it will malfunction and regurgitate and tries to find a solution ... he fails. A few months later the real toilet on the real ISS malfunctioned in a quite similar way.
      • Similarly, Howard manages to get the Mars rover stuck in a sand drift. He was eventually able to free it, though.
    • In the first season, after Sheldon leaves the other geeks' Physics Bowl team to form his own, the geeks discuss who might serve as a replacement; they consider Mayim Bialik, the actress who played Blossom, but decide that'd probably be a lost cause. A good decision; as the third season finale shows, she's much more suited to Sheldon's team anyway...
    • In the second season, Sheldon and Leonard have to give a lecture to a room full of students. The students were extras picked from the show's resident physics researcher's class. This creates two hilarious moments when you know this: Firstly, Sheldon Cooper, an actor, delivers a speech to a room full of physics students about how they are not smart enough to compare to him. Secondly, there's an inside joke. The physics researcher for the show put the answers to their last exam up on the board behind Leonard and Sheldon.
    • An intentional one in the flashback episode at the end of Season 3. While making out the roommate agreement, Leonard asks if Friday night being Firefly night needs to be in the agreement. Sheldon responds that they might as well decide now, because the show is going to be on for years.
    • A rather amusing little one is when in the Pilot, Sheldon and Leonard introduce themselves to Penny as "her next-door neighbors". She assumes they mean it in the romantic sense, which they quickly clear up with a "we're not living together, living together, we're roommates" line. Kind of ironic now that Jim Parsons (the guy who plays Sheldon) came out as gay in early summer 2012.
    • "The Codpiece Topology" is a lot funnier to watch after Amy was introduced to the show, particularly Leonard's line "If science ever discovers a second member of your species and you two would like some privacy, I would be more than happy to get out of your way." and Sheldon lamenting about how everybody has a girlfriend except him.
  • In 2013, a Big Brother 15 (US) houseguest referred to fellow houseguest Candice as "Blannie", making fun of the fact that she was adopted. Fast forward to 2014, where Annie is being remade and Annie is given a Race Lift and actually looks somewhat like a young Candice.
  • In the Big Fat Quiz of the Year 2008, Sean Lock suggested fake answers to some of the questions. To the question about something that "disrupted people's plans" (the answer being the chaos at Heathrow's Terminal 5 opening), he jokingly said it was a volcano. Two years later, Eyjafjallajökull's eruption caused even greater disruptions by grounding flights across Europe.
    • The quiz in 2006 had a Countdown-like conundrum, featuring Carol Vorderman and even a cut-down version of the thinking music, which Jimmy dances to. This was long before Jimmy Carr began hosting 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown.
    • The 2015 quiz had a question about Kanye West anointing himself the greatest living rock and roll star at Glastonbury and David Mitchell joking that Kanye must not have a lot of money because he had to do his own announcing. Two months later Kanye declares he's $53 million in debt and asking Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg for a loan.
  • This sketch on Big Train of a Billie Piper fan becoming despondent over the lackluster chart performance of one of her singles, comparing it to the flame-out of other former pop stars like Debbie Gibson or Sonia. Although Billie doesn't sing anymore, she's most certainly doing well for herself. (A reference to her now-ex-husband Chris Evans is also rather amusing in hindsight.)
    • Adding to the hilarity is that both the dad and mom in the sketch would appear in Doctor Who episodes during Piper's tenure as Rose Tyler: Simon Pegg as The Editor in "The Long Game" and Tracy Ann Oberman as Yvonne Hartman in "Army of Ghosts" / "Doomsday". Pegg had also been briefly considered for the role of Pete Tyler.
  • In the Big Wolf on Campus episode "Blame It On The Haim", Corey Haim comes to Pleasantville to shoot a vampire movie - which, as he and Merton put it, is a "direct-to-video beach party".
  • An episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy featured a fake commercial advertising water like a sports drink. "Water: It's What the Pros Drink!" The point was that sports drinks were a waste of money when you can get water — which is much healthier — for free, not that people should start buying plain old water in bottles that cost the same amount as sports drinks. And yet, here we are.
  • Birds of Prey (2002):
  • In one episode of "The Black Adder", Prince Edmund has an arranged marriage to a Princess Leia of Hungary, who turns out to be a little girl. The "Star Wars" reference in her name becomes funnier since the Obi-Wan Kenobi series showed us the galactic Princess Leia as a little girl.
  • In the pilot episode of Bones, Booth compares himself and Brennan to Mulder and Scully. This was a funny line at the time, but it's even more hilarious when you consider not only that Brennan develops into an exaggerated version of Scully and Booth, a watered-down version of Mulder, and that they faced several of the same problems, such as Brennan and Scully both going through a phase where they wanted a baby and Brennan and Mulder both realizing that their parents weren't who they thought, but that their relationship progressed in much the same way, both culminating in (off-screen) sex after a traumatic event, which we weren't even sure really happened until it led to a pregnancy. Could be Fridge Brilliance if done intentionally.
  • In an episode of Boston Legal, in what turned out to be a prank, Denny Crane was told he'd been tapped as a dark horse candidate for Republican party leader.
    Alan Shore: Denny, no offense, but this is beyond preposterous - beyond.
    Denny Crane: Why? Bigger nut jobs have been floated in the past - Lee Iacocca, Donald Trump, Jesse Ventura. Why not me?
  • In one early episode of Boy Meets World Eric refers to his lucky towel as "towelie". Especially since the show made a bunch of actual South Park references several seasons later after South Park came on in 1997.
  • The Boys (2019): Jack Quaid's character being part of a group dedicated to destroying superheroes becomes this now that he lends this voice to My Adventures with Superman as one of the most iconic superheroes in history.
  • The Brady Bunch had an episode where Peter joined both the glee club and the football team.
  • "Cake" from Brass Eye, already utterly hilarious. It's a made-up drug, which they somehow managed to convince people meant that it was made from chemicals rather than that it was, well, made up. Or to put it another way, the cake is a lie.
  • Breaking Bad:
  • In this show (UK-only link) from 1999, Rory Bremner impersonates Gordon Brown (starting at around 03:26):
    We did inherit a golden legacy, the best situation, the most encouraging set of statistics since the War. But clearly, Kirsty, it's going to take us some time to turn that round.
  • The mid-2000s saw a large number of British reality shows about modern teenagers having to live 1950s-style lives. Nearly all those would include a Traumatic Haircut scene where said teen had to have his hair cut into a short-back-and-sides. Fast forward to 2012 when those hairstyles came back into fashion and the teens complaining about their "old fashioned" hair becomes hilarious.
  • In the pilot of Castle, the protagonist's author poker buddies react to his killing off his money-making character. One of them is James Patterson, who says, "You don't see me trying to kill off Alex Cross." Cue a few months later, James Patterson shoots an ad for his latest Alex Cross novel, where he says, "Buy this book, or I'll have to kill Alex Cross."
  • In a 1979 episode of Charlie's Angels, future James Bond Timothy Dalton guest stars as a cat burglar. Early on, his character is described as a man of "James Bondian tastes."
  • Charmed:
    • The first season has an episode titled 'The Fourth Sister'. Season 4 reveals that the Halliwells had a fourth sister after all.
    • Rose McGowan in her first episode nearly orbs a man's heart out of his stomach. Fast forward to Once Upon a Time where Rose plays the younger Cora - who is known for ripping people's hearts out. Also a season 5 episode has Paige biting into Snow White's poisoned apple. In OUAT Cora is Snow White's step-grandmother.
    • A Season 6 episode has Paige asked to stop the "Wicked Witch of the Enchanted Forest". In OUAT she is the Wicked Witch of the Enchanted Forest. Likewise the episode "A Knight To Remember" where Paige's past life is an Evil Enchantress (also played by Rose) who wants to seize control of a kingdom by marrying the prince - Cora's main motivation in OUAT.
  • Cheers:
    • Right after Frasier is first turned down by Lilith, Sam sets him up with an old girlfriend Candy as a one-night stand, and Frasier ends up impulsively getting engaged to her, prompting Diane to intervene. Later on in Frasier, the same actress plays another cheap date Frasier plans to spend the night with, only this time it's interrupted by the woman he loves walking in. This is more of a case of Casting Gag, according to Word of God.
    • In one episode, Diane keeps pronouncing "mime" as "meme", saying, "Everybody loves a meme!"
    • In Season Five's "Abnormal Psychology", Norm and Cliff return from a "gladiator film festival" arguing about the number of anachronisms in what they've seen. Their exchange about a taxi cab allegedly being in one of the films can easily cause modern viewers to briefly think they're talking about the 1999 movie Titus (famous for its use of motorcycles and cars in Imperial Rome)...though the episode first aired thirteen years before the movie's release!
    • In Season Two's "How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Call You Back", Diane is lounging about in her apartment at night, drunk, with the lights off and a host of lit candles throughout the living room. When Sam stops by, he remarks that the ambiance invokes a haunted house (when Diane turns on the lights, Sam chuckles, "No bats!"). Years later, Shelley Long would guest-star in Sabrina the Teenage Witch as a wicked witch.
    • Woody Harrelson plays a character who winds up in the audience of Jeopardy! both in the episode "Who Is Cliff Clavin?" and a few years later, in the film White Men Can't Jump.
      • Another Woody Harrelson example, in the Season 9 episode Rat Girl, Woody, taunting the dieting Rebecca, glows about how much he loves snowballs and shoves one into his mouth whole. In the movie Zombieland Woody's character is frustrated when he comes across a truck carrying only Snowballs on his search for a Twinkie - refusing to settle due to a hatred of coconut.
      • Cliff goes on Jeopardy!, but blows what could have been a record-setting game by stupidly wagering everything in "Final Jeopardy!", even though he'd effectively locked up the game. Around the same time the episode aired, Frank Spangenberg had a 5-game run in which he set both a 1-day record of $30,600 and an all-time record of $102,597 in his final game.
    • Frasier's mentor, Dr. Bennett Ludlow, has an affair with Carla, an average working woman who's been around the block a few times and seems completely wrong for him. Pretty much the same thing happens again in Frasier when his other mentor Dr. Tewksbury has a fling with Roz, his producer.
    • In a latter episode Cliff starts out directing a video for Woody's and Kelly's families but proves such a Prima Donna Director that he gets replaced by Frasier, who turns out to be just as bad. This has an extra layer of hilarity when you consider that John Ratzenberger was a semi-regular director on this series, and Kelsey Grammer later became one of the most frequent directors on Frasier. Plus, Frasier is again a horrible director in his own show's "Ham Radio," often considered one of its best episodes.
    • In the second part of Kelly and Woody's wedding, Sam is attacked by a jealous, sword-armed German husband who thinks his wife is cheating with him before Frasier steps in with his poor understanding of German to convince him to back off. Frasier and his brother Niles are attacked by another German swordsman in Frasier, where infidelity is again the motive.
    • All the Boston Red Sox jokes. The Boston Red Sox, after a long losing streak, would go on to win the World Series in 2004, 2007, 2013, and 2018.
    • More minor example. In season 5, there's an episode entitled "The Godfather, Part 3", a few years before there actually was a Godfather III.
    • One episode has Lilith (while she's married to Frasier) become despondent when one of her lab rats dies. Eventually, she becomes so distraught she starts carrying the rat's corpse around in her purse. On Frasier, he finds his mother's journals (she was herself a scientist) and discovers she too became emotionally attached to her lab rats. (Her journal says that one of them dying was the thing she feared most.) In fact, she was so attached to her rats she named her sons after them.
    • "Send In the Crane" has Frasier filling in for Woody as a clown at a child's birthday party. As Woody hands over the equipment, he comments "It takes a big man to fill these shoes" and hands him a pair of massive clown shoes. A little over a year later, The Simpsons had the "Krusty Gets Busted" episode where Sideshow Bob (who like Frasier is played by Kelsey Grammer) frames Krusty for robbing the Kwik-E-Mart. The clue that tips off Bart of the frame-up is that Krusty has small feet compared to his big clown shoes while Bob has huge feet that require large shoes.
    • When Woody first starts doing community theatre, Carla makes some disparaging comments about his lack of success as an actor. Now that Woody Harrelson is the show's most successful former cast member, he's apparently gotten the last laugh.
    • Sam Malone has his own Plan Z in an episode of Season 9.
    • When then-Senator John Kerry cameoed on the show, his surname was misspelled as "Kerrey" in the closing credits. This foreshadowed the much bigger error over his surname a Minnesota electoral college voter would make during Kerry's presidential run in 2004 when they mistakenly voted for someone named "John Ewards", which was taken as a vote for Kerry's running-mate, John Edwards. A possible explanation was that at the time of Kerry's appearance in the episode "Bar Wars VI: This Time It's For Real" in Season 10, its early 1992 airdate coincided with the 1992 Presidential campaign of Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, who like John Kerry was a Democratic Senator and who had fought in The Vietnam War; with Kerrey losing part of one leg in combat.
    • Norm once remarked that Ed Asner was the only actor who could play his wife. Norm, did you somehow marry Granny Goodness?
  • In an episode of CHiPs in season 4 Dwight Schultz guest-starred as a Vietnam Vet who was traumatised from his experiences in the war and spent time in a VA Hospital...a full two years prior to him becoming Murdock on The A-Team.
  • In the first episode of The Chris Rock Show, Chris Rock is seen touring the studio as though it were years later, and one of the things he shows is a self-help video by O.J. Simpson titled "I Didn't Kill My Wife! But If I Did, Here's How I'd Do It". Years later, O.J. actually would publish a book entitled "If I Did It" about how he would've done the deed.
  • An episode of Clarissa Explains It All, circa 1992, has the title character's brother watching TV claiming "Cowboys and Aliens is on." Jump to 2011...
  • In-universe example in the Cold Case episode "Late Returns". The episode aired and was primarily set in 2004, but a series of flashbacks in the episode date back to 1992 and Bill Clinton's election. In one of these, the following conversation takes place:
    'Beth Reardon: Does it bother you that he's such a womanizer?
    Vanessa Prosser: He's not going to do that in the White House.
  • The series The Commish had an episode where a rookie was complaining about not being given any tough assignments. He finally snapped "I'm a man, and I'm ready to do a man's job!". That rookie was played by Eric McCormack, who later starred in Will & Grace.
  • Community:
    • In the episode "Modern Warfare" has the college's students engage in a massive paintball war. The study group encounters the college's glee club (an Expy of the one from Glee) at one point and defeats them. As a parting shot, Jeff tells them "Write some original songs!" The following year, it was announced that Glee would do an episode with original songs.
    • Jeff constantly makes fun of the Dean's writing abilities ("That is gonna be the worst book I ever read cover to cover"). Jim Rash, who played the Dean, would win an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2011.
    • The election episode has an actor playing then-Vice-President Joe Biden, in a joke about how little the vice president actually does, say, "I had a dream that I was the regular president". That dream apparently saw eleven years into the future.
  • One of those "Cops with Cameras" TV shows, the sort which are on a never-ending repeat loop on British TV, was filmed in Salisbury, Wiltshire:
    • A cop, threatened with a large and truculent person, actually said, on camera:
    "If you carry on offering me violence, somebody is going to get gassed in this town"
    • The cop meant his pepper spray, CS Gas, or whatever. However, in the light of more recent events in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England.
  • A joke in an early episode of Corner Gas has Davis explaining his theory that Battlestar Galactica could have actually happened. Just plausible enough from the original series. But if you flash-forward to the finale of the reimagined series, this is exactly what's said to have happened.
  • Coronation Street had a storyline where Sophie Webster stole £20,000 from her father's bank account. Four years earlier, the same thing happened. It makes the original blog post less funny.
  • The Cosby Show:
    • In a late episode Rudy is having some A-Cup Angst because she hasn't developed as fast as some other middle school girls. Fast forward to today, actress Keshia Knight Pullam is very curvy as an adult.
    • For anyone who's watched later episodes and then re-watched the pilot, there is an exchange between Mr. and Mrs. Huxtable that goes "Why did we have four children?" "Because we didn't want five." The show later added the character Sondra, the oldest of their FIVE children.
  • In a Season One episode of Cousin Skeeter where Skeeter tries to avoid his old girlfriend, Nina says how much of a crush she has on Tiger Woods, which Bobby replies, "I heard he had a girlfriend." Player hater indeed, Bobby.
  • In the first episode of Criminal Minds, Hotch says that while Hayley likes the name Henry for their unborn son, Hotch doesn't because it reminds him of the Serial Killer Henry Lee Lucas. This connection apparently doesn't bother JJ, though, because when she has a son in a later series, he's named Henry. note 
    • In that same premiere episode, a suspect mentions a research paper Gideon had written explaining that there had never been a true case of a murderer with multiple personalities. There were at least two later episodes featuring murderers with multiple personalities.
  • In 2009, Cuba Gooding Jr. starred in an inspirational low-budget TV biopic about an African-American brain surgeon who overcame his impoverished upbringing, turned to God, and eventually managed to separate a pair of conjoined twins. Sounds pretty forgettable...unless you know that the surgeon in question is Dr. Ben Carson, who would run for President of the United States six years after that telefilm aired. The film is called Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story. Watching it today, it can seem like a pretty big oversight that Carson's "life story" never even mentions him running for President. Or even being involved in politics at all.

    D-F 
  • In this clip from The Daily Show way back in January of 1999, commentator Beth Littleford does interviews at Super Bowl XXXIII, and late in the clip, ends up making comparisons to gay porn while asking uncomfortable sexual questions about homosexual sex to various players, including Esera Tuaolo, who, three years after that show aired, came out of the closet.
    • Plus, Jon Stewart once interviewed Gen. Petraeus' biographer, who told him about how much Petraeus liked to challenge her and how manly he was. It was, of course, later lampshaded by Stewart.
    • During the 2008 presidential election, The Daily Show played a satirical biographical film about then-nominee Barack Obama called "Barack Obama: He Completes Us", which parodied The Lion King. In the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner, now-President Obama trolled Fox News and the birthers, particularly Donald Trump, by playing footage of what he claimed was from his birth, before revealing it was really the opening of The Lion King.
    • On the 2008 Election Night, once Obama won, Larry Wilmore announced that, because of the election of America's first black president, he'd be replacing Jon Stewart as host and Wyatt Cenac would be replacing Stephen Colbert. In 2015, Wilmore replaced Colbert with The Nightly Show, and the half-black Trevor Noah replaced Stewart as host of The Daily Show.
    • In one episode, Stewart mocked a video of Lin-Manuel Miranda performing a rap about Alexander Hamilton, stating that the concept of someone rapping about the founding fathers was completely ridiculous. In 2015, Miranda turned the concept into Hamilton, one of the most successful Broadway shows in years.
  • David Duchovny starring in Californication as a charming, self-deprecating Chivalrous Pervert brought low by ennui and too much fame: entertaining. David Duchovny starring in Californication as a charming, self-deprecating Chivalrous Pervert brought low by ennui and too much fame after publicly admitting to an affair with his tennis coach and entering rehab for sex addiction: hilarious.
    • Actually, the story about the tennis instructor was proven false and retracted by the newspaper that printed it. There's no evidence that he ever cheated on his wife.
    • Replace the Californication references above with references with Red Shoe Diaries, and it becomes even more hilarious.
    • Add to that Fox Mulder's addiction to porn....
    • And his Twin Peaks character's propensity for cross-dressing. No wonder the man has a sex addiction.
  • In a 2003 movie Dead Bodies, Kelly Reilly (who played Mary Morstan in 2009 Sherlock Holmes) played the love interest of Andrew Scott, who- forward about a year later in 2010- plays Moriarty in Sherlock.
  • During one of the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts, comedian/comedic actor Nipsey Russell joked about how someone asked him when the first black U.S. president would be elected; his response was, "Only when he runs against a Mexican." Given that Mitt Romney's father George was born and raised in Mexico (thus making Romney part "Mexican").... (You can see this joke as one of the highlights on the Celebrity Roasts DVD collection infomercial.)
  • In 1989 or 1990, there is an episode of "Deke Wilson's Mini-Mysteries" (a Canadian TV show) where someone dresses up as Captain Flamingo. 7 or 6 years later, this happened.
  • Dickinson: Finn Jones has a role in the second season and he's probably most well known for his role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe show Iron Fist (2017). About ten months after the second season premiered, Hailee Steinfeld also made her debut in another MCU show, Hawkeye (2021).
  • The Dick Van Dyke Show:
    • Rob is writing a children's story whose main characters are animals and asks Buddy and Sally for advice. Buddy suggests he make the book into a sexy magazine centerfold. "You mean a giraffe in black mesh stockings?" Sally asks. "What's the matter with that? It could be a whole series: Animal of the Month! 'Hey, Charlie, did you see the zebra this month? No stripes!'" Then the '60s audience laughs because this would be completely absurd. Oh, for those halcyon pre-internet days... (And right before this Buddy had suggested the book have "furry pages.")
    • In another episode, Rob is attending the reading of his great Uncle Hezekiah's will where he learns the old man's estate is worth more than a million dollars. His half-brother adds bitterly:
      Alfred: It could have been ten million if he had died a year earlier. I told him not to invest in 3D movies. One of us is going to get stuck with ten million pairs of cardboard eyeglasses.
  • In the Dirty Jobs Shark Week episode "Dirty Jobs that Bite Harder", after making/testing a shark suit, Mike mentions that he "Does it once, and crosses it off the list". When the suit's inventor, Jeremiah Sullivan, comments on this, Mike replies with a joking "Get a TV show, cross it off the list." One or two years later, during Shark Week, we see Jeremiah again— a major part of another show.
  • In the end of the second of Discovering Spirit Contemporary, Amanda gets ready to leave her abusive husband and even confronts him while she's about to leave. He assumes that she has been watching a "little too much Dr. Phil". Discovering Spirit Contemporary was aired on TBN. Fast forward to 2024, where Dr. Phil himself teaming up with TBN to launch his own TV channel Merit Street Media with his daytime talk show being revived there.
  • In an early episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, the male lead becomes paralyzed from the waist down. What's his name? Sully.
  • Doctor Who:
    Casanova: "Someone said you need a doctor?"
    • And now the 11th Doctor apparently owes Casanova a chicken.
  • In Takin' Over the Asylum when asked what prizes the station could give away Tennant's character, Campbell, says this:
    Campbell: It can be anything we like. A trip to Graceland by time machine to meet Elvis. Lunch with the archbishop of Canterbury. I don’t have to conform to the vagaries of time and space. I’m a loony for God’s sake.
  • More or less anything Vince (Queer as Folk (UK)) has to comment about Doctor Who becomes extremely funny for all those who picked up the series because Russell T. Davies created the series back when, before his new project NuWho was realized.
    • Similarly, the Steven Moffat-penned series Coupling had Oliver, a Doctor Who fan who, in one episode, wears a shirt declaring "Bring Back Doctor Who", a year before the show was bought back and six years before The Moff himself became its showrunner.
  • Following Peter Capaldi's casting as the twelfth Doctor, a lot of Malcolm Tucker's lines come out more hilarious than before - especially this one, which sounds like a very special "Welcome to the TARDIS" speech:
    We've fucking time-travelled, yes? We're in a weird and wonderful world where everything is different! Maybe outside the polar ice caps have melted! Maybe there's fucking robots knocking about and Davina McCall is the new Pope! Maybe you can download rice!
  • Another David Tennant example: An episode of the Murder-investigation-occasionally-interrupted-by-song-and-dance-routines 6-episode Blackpool features him walking past a Doctor Who museum over a year before he would go on to play the Tenth Doctor.
  • In one episode of Double the Fist, Steve says he's sick of widescreen TV and invents "Tall Screen TV" (by making viewers turn their TVs on their side). Now, entire swathes of smartphone-filmed video are filmed in "tall screen", including practically all of Vine.
  • Dragnet:
    • A cult leader talked to Sgt. Friday about how pot should be legal and that the 60s generation and the future generations will help embrace marijuana. There are now states that have been making or are pushing to make marijuana legal (or, at the very least, decriminalized, so long as it's for personal use with no intent to sell).
    • In another episode about Joe and Bill trying to encourage young black men to join the police force, O. J. Simpson is among the bit-players seen taking the class.
  • An episode of Drake & Josh reveals that Megan has her own web show. Megan was played by Miranda Cosgrove which is pretty funny considering what her next TV show would be. They even foreshadow this at the movie theater at which Josh works in a late episode with a movie titled "Now She's Carly." Most of the movie titles they put up are joke titles and parodies that you won't notice unless you watch again, or pause it.
  • Eerie, Indiana: There's an episode where the main characters are out to stop a werewolf that's named after an actor famous for playing the Wolfman, but a vaguer description would be "some guys go out hunting and someone gets shot." The episode? It's called Mr. Chaney.
  • In another case involving Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Even Stevens has an episode that ends with Louis and his father going through an Indiana Jones parody involving a giant golden sausage. Guess which actor would later co-star in the next IJ movie?
    • As Indy's son, no less.
  • In an episode of Everybody Hates Chris, Greg reveals that he cosplays in his sleep. He chooses a different character for each night. One of which is Robin. A few years later, his actor, Vincent Martella, would do the voice of the teenage Jason Todd in Batman: Under the Red Hood. The show took place when Jason Todd was still Robin.
  • Kate Winslet cameoed as herself in the British comedy series Extras, where she announced her intention to star in a Holocaust film in order to finally win an Oscar. A few years later, she finally won an Oscar for The Reader, which is, you guessed it, a Holocaust film.
    • Made even funnier by the fact that Extras-Winslet appears to show a rather irreverent attitude to the Holocaust ("I mean how many films have there been about the Holocaust? We get it! It was grim. Move on."). In The Reader she plays an SS officer.
      • Ricky Gervais lampshaded this at an award ceremony, you can find it on youtube.
    • Made extra extra funny by the "OSCAR CLIP" quote in Wayne's World: "I never learned to read!"
    • Also there's the fact that, for extra awards bait Extras-Winslet was playing a nun in the film. Come real-world Oscar night, Winslet's main competitor for Best Actress was Meryl Streep for Doubt...in which she played a nun.
  • A Family Matters episode features Eddie singing a song that consists entirely of the word "baby," which he proudly says he wrote himself. Um...
  • An episode of Father Ted features a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax involving a mysterious sheep-eating beast. Dougal, who is terrified of it, rattles off a long list of increasingly ridiculous characteristics that he's been told that it has, finishing with "...and instead of a mouth, it's got four arses!". Several years later, Dr Mephisto on South Park would genetically engineer various four-arsed creatures as a recurring gag.
  • In the Australian TV series The Ferals, the leader of the group of animals is a rat named Rattus Rattus. Fifteen years later...
  • Firefly:
  • The Flash (1990):
  • The first quarter of 2013 saw a pair of Dueling Shows focusing on Meta Fiction; Fox's The Following and CW's Cult. The Following revolved around a charismatic serial killer who recruits a cult of damaged individuals to kill for him according to a pre-packaged script as if the serial killer was writing a cliched potboiler thriller novel, Cult was a twisted Twin Peaks-esque exploration of demented fandom, with an obsessive creator pursuing an enigmatic "vision" for his TV series and equally obsessive "True Believers" tearing the episodes apart looking for hidden messages - one of which may be "Kill For Us". Hilarious part? At the end of the pilot episode of The Following, the Big Bad Chessmaster gives his mission statement; "You know, my first book was... clearly too avant-garde. Lost in literati pretense. Now my new story... will play to a much wider audience." On April 4th, 2013, Cult was cancelled due to a perceived lack of viewership, while The Following was renewed for a second season, thus clearly demonstrating that, yes, a straightforward tale of sex and violence appeals to a much wider audience of Moronic Viewers than a twisted Mind Screw requiring much more investment. Meta beyond imagination.
  • In a Frasier episode, Frasier and Niles are shocked to learn that an old Shakespearean actor they admired as children is now starring in a science fiction series (a reference to Patrick Stewart in Star Trek), which he hates. The guy that played the actor? Derek "The Master" Jacobi (ironically, Jacobi has stated that a part in Doctor Who was a lifelong dream). And Frasier Crane is played by Kelsey "The Beast" Grammer (who had also previously done an appearance on Star Trek).
    • What makes this even funnier is that before he bumps into Jacobi's character, Frasier says "I can't believe I'm scouring a convention for X-Men comics! I feel like I'm contributing to the decline of my son's intellect!"
    • In another episode, Frasier refers to his new agent (played by Kristin Chenoweth) as his old agent's winged monkey. Chenowith later starred as Glinda in the first Broadway run of Wicked.
    • In the same vein as the Neil Patrick Harris one, there's this scene from the season one finale (made funnier by Niles' Aside Glance at the end):
      Niles: (Upon seeing Roz's date) Wow!
      Frasier: "Wow"? Did you say "wow"?
      Niles: I did, didn't I? I have never said "wow" about another man before. I wonder if that means anything.
      Frasier: (Voice dripping with sarcasm) Yes. It means you are a gay man. Your entire marriage with Maris has been a scam, and you should have come out of the closet years ago. Do you want to tell Dad, or should I?
      • Similarly, "The Doctor is Out" has Niles make several snarky comments that Roz's Camp Straight boyfriend is heavily in the closet.
      • The episode "Head Game" had Niles unwittingly playing a good luck charm to a struggling Sonics player. At the end of the episode, he tried to cut off the relationship with the player. He breaks it off at the end with a horrified security guard in the locker room. Unfortunately, the guard walks in again on the player saying "Just let me touch it." David Hyde Pierce would come out of the closet in 2007.
    • The episode where Frasier and Niles become convinced they're descended from the Romanovs is much funnier given another of Kelsey Grammer's roles.
    • The episode with Patrick Stewart wouldn't be the last time Kelsey Grammer and Patrick Stewart would work together.
    • The episode where Sam Malone shows up, Sam and Roz do a bit of flirting. Almost 2 decades later, Ted Danson and Peri Gilpin play husband and wife on CSI.
  • Freaky: At the end of "Dice", Daniel implies that he likes (or used to like) My Little Pony. Fast forward seven years...
  • Free Spirit (1989):
    • This short-lived sitcom features a Cute Witch who becomes a Magical Nanny to three mortal, motherless children. Alyson Hannigan played one of those children, and would later perform some witchcraft of her own as Buffy the Vampire Slayer character Willow.
    • The pilot has said witch conjure concert tickets for Hannigan and her older brother, by making them pop out of a toaster, predating by seven years Sabrina the Teenage Witch's use of a toaster as a magical mailbox.
  • Once Upon a time a then-unknown Jada Pinkett was turned down for a role as one of Will's many girlfriends on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. She would later marry Will Smith.
    • You can also see footage from a home video of her as a young girl in Tupac: Resurrection, dancing to one of Smith's songs.
    • It gets better. She was turned down because she and Will didn't have any chemistry. Something with which Will clearly disagreed.
    • A season 4 episode has Will mocking an actor he didn't believe as a cowboy with a sarcastic dance and repeated refrain of "Wild Wild West".
  • In the Alternate Universe of Fringe, one of the differences is that DC Comics publishes Red Lantern and Red Arrow (who apart from the colour scheme are identical to their mainstream counterparts). It has not yet been revealed what the AU versions of Atrocitus's Anger Corps and Roy Harper's third identity are.
  • Watching Bob Saget on Full House becomes much funnier if you've heard his stand-up routine, and know just how sick his sense of humor is.

    G-K 
  • On Glee Kurt once tells Sebastian that he doesn't like his 'obnoxious CW hair.' Fast-forward a few years and Grant Gustin is now best known for his role in The Flash (2014)... on the CW network.
  • A recurring bit in the first season of The Good Place is Jacksonville native Jason's undying love of his Jaguars, historically one of the worst teams in the NFL. The second season (airing in 2017) has Michael point blank telling Jason the Jaguars "will never get to the Super Bowl." As it happened, the Jaguars went 10-6 that year and just one call away from the AFC Championship. In season 3, a cosmic judge shocks Michael by saying that, among other effects of sending people back from the afterlife is that "The Jacksonville Jaguars are good! They're going to make the playoffs!"
    • Which becomes even more hysterical as at the time the episode aired, the Jags were 3-1. Immediately after the airing, Jacksonville proceeded to lose their next seven games and finished the 2018 season 5-11. It got the point of some websites even speculating the show had "cursed" the team.
  • On The Golden Girls, many jokes are made about how tall, heavy-set Dorothy (Bea Arthur) is described as tough and masculine. Bea Arthur was a Truck Driver in the US Marines.
  • The Goon Show's Grand Finale The Last Goon Show of All was recorded for both radio and TV in 1972. Before the show proper begins, Peter Sellers - whose screen career was bottoming out at the time - does a bit where he whistles the soliloquy from Hamlet. "That was Mr. Sellers rehearsing his comeback," the announcer explains afterward. Three years later, his rehearsing paid off when The Pink Panther film series was revived with The Return of the Pink Panther.
  • In season 4 of Gossip Girl Blair dates a prince and the designated roadblock between them is that she's a commoner and he is heir to the throne. It's taken for granted that a royal prince could never marry a commoner. Probably was a safe bet when the episodes were written. But the episode in which it is brought up aired mere days before the heir to the British throne Prince William married commoner Kate Middleton amidst a media frenzy spectacle and the union was celebrated by everyone everywhere, including William's family members.
    • An example of sloppy research; since at least the '60s, most Royal families have been pretty relaxed about who their heirs marry. In 2001 the Crown Prince of Norway married a divorced single mother, who had dabbled with drugs and the rave scene. This was followed by a string of heirs to various thrones marrying commoners: The Moroccan crown prince in 2001, the Dutch crown prince to an Argentinian in 2002, the Spanish crown prince in 2004, the Danish crown prince to an Australian commoner in 2005, and the Swedish crown princess in 2010. In most countries, the choice has to be approved by the head of state, but this has rarely proven to be a problem. More absurd still, Blair herself makes a number of references to Grace Kelly, a commoner who married the Prince of Monaco. The prince Blair gets engaged to just so happens to be the prince of... Monaco. And in fact, no prince of Monaco has married a non-commoner since the mid-19th century.
  • In an episode of Greek in March of '08, Cappie calls rival Evan "Evan Longoria", making fun of him by linking him with the Desperate Housewife of similar name. Seven months later, baseball player Evan Longoria wins the Rookie of the Year award and leads his team to the World Series. Who's laughing now, Cappie?
  • In season three of Grey's Anatomy Mark has a conversation with Callie asking her if she thinks he'd be a good father. She comes to the conclusion that he wouldn't. Four seasons later she gets pregnant with his baby. And by that point, she has no reservations about his parenting ability.
  • In Growing Pains, when Mike Seaver is arrested for a protest he and some students orchestrated to reinstate their coach, Ben Seaver, who was watching the report and talking on the phone, mentions that a lot of the family was calling them about it, even "Uncle Sam." Kirk Cameron, the person who played Mike Seaver, will later direct several pro-American documentaries.
  • In one episode of H₂O: Just Add Water Cleo's little sister almost uncovers that Cleo, Emma, and Rikki are mermaids, and thinks they are monsters. Emma's little brother suggests talking to them, to which she says something like "They can't be reasoned with, they're not human. They're like witches, or vampires." Well, two of them are vampires now...
  • During the 1980 filming of Hamlet on The BBC, Patrick Stewart was riding in a lift with Lalla Ward, who played the second Romana on Doctor Who. Among his questions that he asked were why she did television as opposed to theatre, and why she liked working in science fiction saying "I wouldn't want to do that sort of stuff." Really!
  • An episode of Hannah Montana sees Miley Stewart trying to put some edge into her act as Hannah after seeing how her idol, Isis, reinvents herself over the years. This not only eventually happened in a way with Miley's own image in a few years but adds particular new irony when you look at her "punkier" onstage wardrobe as of late◊. She's not above wearing the occasional ripped Iron Maiden or Nirvana tour T-shirt in candids, either.
  • In Hannibal, Will Graham is implied to be on the autism spectrum; when asked "Where do you fall on the spectrum?" he responds "My horse is hitched to a post that is closer to Asperger's and autistics than narcissists and sociopaths." Anthony Hopkins, responsible for the most famous version of the title character, has since revealed that he himself is autistic.
  • A late 1970s ad for Los Angeles NBC station KNBC-TV 4 promoting Card Sharks and High Rollers included the headline "A New Daily Double Starts Tomorrow. Needless to say, this would not be the last time Alex Trebek, then the host of High Rollers, would be associated with the words "Daily Double".
  • The only reason Hitonatsu no Papa e, an obscure 2003 TV drama in Japan, is even known at this point is because the 5th episode features the heroine, played by Aya Ueto, being kidnapped by a villain played by Masato Sakai... Sakai and Ueto would be husband and wife in Hanzawa Naoki 10 years later.
  • On the October 1st, 1999 episode of the game show The Hollywood Squares, one question was about Mick Jagger's 7 kids, where Whoopi Goldberg joked that she was carrying his 8th. Tom Bergeron stated that this was a very special episode. Later on, the episode's entire second half revolved around the two contestants attempting to get Gilbert Gottfried for the five square win. Every time the contestant was wrong, Gottfried would shout "YOU FOOL!" at them until a contestant won. This is arguably the most well-known episode. A very special episode indeed.
  • On the series finale of Home Improvement Tim gives Al the nickname of "Al, Be Doing Infomercials for a Living, Boreland" on the final episode of Tool Time. Fast forward over the course of twenty years and Richard Karn, the actor who played Al Boreland has starred in several product informercials for home & garden type products including Little Giant Ladders, Pocket Hose, and 50 Floor.
  • In Homicide: Life on the Street, a major plot point is Kellerman's (Reed Diamond's) murder of a drug dealer, particularly getting past Internal Affairs. In The Shield, Vic Mackey murders Terry Crowley (Reed Diamond) and claims an already dead dealer did it. It is also the main reason he is so loathed in the series finale.
  • In one episode of The Honeymooners, someone threatens to have his friend Arnold beat up Ralph. Ralph isn't afraid, because Arnold is such a wimpy-sounding name, he couldn't possibly be very strong. note 
  • There's a scene in season one of House where House is talking to a black senator who is running for President. He suspects the man has contracted HIV from a homosexual encounter and says "Someday there will be a black president. Someday there will be a gay president. There may even be a black gay president. The only combination I don't see is black, gay, and dead." Snarky at the time, but after Barack Obama's election it's hilarious.
    • They even LOOK similar. They both have short hair, a mole on the left cheek. They're both depicted as charismatic speakers - face it, it's an expy of Obama, from when he was just up and coming.
    • "You're not going to be president either way. It's not called the White House because of the paint job."
    • In one episode, House's roommate from the asylum moves in with him. He has issues with his status as a US citizen, which House clears up. He leaves, saying now that he won't have any problems with immigration, he plans to move to Arizona. This episode aired about a week after Arizona passed several controversial immigration laws.
  • During an early season of Hustle, Jaime Murray's character says that "[she] is in charge of the Bronze Age, but not the Age itself as that would make her a time traveller." Flash forward 5 years and Jaime plays the role of H.G Wells in Warehouse 13, who was in fact Bronzed and created a working Time Machine that she used. Not to mention that Jaime was named after The Bionic Woman and then starred in Warehouse 13 with Lindsay Wagner who played the original character.
  • In the I Dream of Jeannie episode "Blackmail Order Bride", the woman who pretends to be Tony's wife is named Sue Ellen.
  • A 1955 episode of I Love Lucy, Lucy attempts to seduce Rock Hudson and asks him to "make love to her" in front of her husband.
  • In Living Color!:
    • In a season 1 sketch Jim Carrey does a routine about metamorphisms. At the very end of the sketch, he pulls out a newspaper and impersonates Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Tim Burton's Batman (1989). Jim Carrey would go on to play the Riddler in Batman Forever.
    • Also, Jamie Foxx often impersonated Ray Charles (this was during the era when the real Ray Charles was doing ads for Diet Pepsi). Foxx later went on to win an Oscar for playing Ray Charles in Ray (2004).
    • A Funky Fingers Productions movie promoted as "a cross between The Wiz and Flatliners" features David Alan Grier in the role of the Cowardly Lion. Twenty-three years later, he'd play the Cowardly Lion in NBC's live telecast of The Wiz, and win an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actor in a Television Movie, Mini-Series or Dramatic Special.note 
  • The Incredible Hulk (1977) changed Bruce Banner's name to David Banner. In the MAD parody of the show, one of the characters asks David about the Adaptation Name Change, and David says that "It used to be Bruce, but to the producers of the show, it didn't sound manly enough". In the background of the panel is a television showing the Olympics with Bruce Jenner winning yet another gold medal, and the announcer saying "Bruce Jenner is the world's greatest athlete!".
  • The Season 2 finale of the series Intelligence (2006) was entitled "We Were Here Now We Disappear". It ended up being the last episode, as the series was cancelled before Season 3 began filming.
  • Jim Carrey's first (released) role was in the made-for-TV Introducing... Janet (later retitled Rubberface), where his first line was "This is going to be my first shot at show business."
  • One memorable Once per Episode trait of the original Iron Chef was Chairman Takeshi Kaga dramatically taking a bite out of a bell pepper. Come 2006, Takeshi Kaga portrayed Soichiro Yagami, the father of Light Yagami, in the live-action Death Note films. Light is known for eating potato chips in the most dramatic way possible. Cue jokes about how Light gets his epic eating skills from his father.
  • In an episode of The IT Crowd, the cast frequently dine in one of Heston Blumenthal's restaurants, called The Flappy Duck.
  • Japanese dubs aren't safe from this:
  • The first episode of the Alex Trebek Jeopardy! in 1984 had these two back-to-back questions: "Two Saturday Night alumni who tried Trading Places", the answer being "Who are Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy?", and "He may Never Say Never Again when asked to be Bond", with the answer obviously being "Who is Sean Connery?". So Sean Connery and SNL have been part of Trebek's Jeopardy! since the beginning!
  • Jessica Jones (2015):
    • In season 1 the actions of Colby Minifie's character end up causing the death of Erin Moriarty. Come The Boys (2019), she's vindicated, as Moriarty creates a PR nightmare that causes her designated agent played by Minifie to be fired. (she's hired back in the following season - and suffers a lot!)
    • In the Season 2 premiere one of Jessica's prospective clients insists that Earth is in danger from lizard-like aliens hiding in human form. Come Captain Marvel (2019), and Earth was visited by the shapeshifting Skrulls back in the 90s...
  • Joey
    • The episode where Joey announced the wrong winner for the award he was presenting at the Daytime Emmys, in the wake of the 2017 Oscars (when a mix-up between the Best Actress and Best Picture envelopes resulted in La La Land almost taking home the Moonlight (2016) Best Picture Oscar).
    • Another episode has Joey asked who his favorite actor is, and, hoping to sound intellectual, says it's Sir Anthony Hopkins, before sheepishly admitting it's The Rock. What could be a lame choice simply played for a joke is more plausible once Dwayne Johnson became the best paid actor in Hollywood.
  • John O'Hurley is not one, but two real-life instances of this trope. First example was his role as catalogue retailer J. Peterman on Seinfeld - O'Hurley later ends up in a business partnership with Peterman in real life. Later on in the UPN sitcom The Mullets he played the role of a game show host. O'Hurley then hosted the revival of To Tell the Truth and went on to host Family Feud.
  • After Kate quibbles over semantics on Jon & Kate Plus Eight, Joel from The Soup quips, "stay tuned for next season's Jon Minus Nine"! Joel eventually realized just how prescient a lot of the jokes he had made about the show were, and the last time he made a full segment on it, he said, "John And Kate Plus Eight... is just kind of sad now."
  • A TV special Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett recorded at Carnegie Hall included some hilarious parodies of "My Favorite Things" and "Do-Re-Mi". Andrews, Burnett, and twenty unidentifiable males performed these songs in character as the "Swiss Family Pratt" (who apparently have twenty children), sharing "happy songs that [Andrews] used to sing when [she] was a happy nun back home in Switzerland." Three years after this ridiculous performance, Julie Andrews portrayed the lead in the Epic Movie of The Sound of Music. Andrews later said the parodies have come back to haunt her many times since. note  For even more irony, the special and that movienote  both have the same musical director: Irwin Kostal.
    • A more indirect omen came when Andrews and Burnett sang a medley of show tunes from various eras of musical theater. The medley ended with "A Boy Like That/I Have a Love" from West Side Story (1961), which resulted in Burnett briefly calling Andrews, "Maria!"
  • The late 2011 portion of Khloe and Kim Kardashian's reality show became this after Kim's 72-day marriage with Kris Humphries ended before the airing began. Predictably, everything the newlyweds-turned-divorcees have said turns into comedy gold, and The Soup has taken advantage of this.
  • There's undoubtedly numerous examples from a show so long-running and steeped in '80s culture as Kids Incorporated. Here are a few.
    • The drummer, who has maybe three lines in the four years he was on the show? That's Mario Lopez.
    • "School's For Fools" — The Kid is brushing off his studies because he plans to be a rock star and doesn't care about school. Instead of studying for finals, he plans to go to a rock concert. Why is this funny? One of the things he's supposed to be studying is the difference between East and West Germany. And the rock star he's going to see? David Hasselhoff
    • "The Boy Who Cried Gorilla" — This 1987 episode includes a cover of "In Too Deep" by Genesis that is performed by the Kid, with main character Richie being the only other character on screen. The funny part is that the song, despite the efforts of Kids Inc. brass to turn the song in question (originally a romantic song) into a friendship one by changing the word "love" to "like". Didn't work. Made even funnier because Rahsaan Patterson ("Kid") is out of the closet now.
    • One of the songs covered in "The Open Book" is "Never Gonna Give You Up".
    • The Season 2 episode "Material Girl" has as a subplot Riley, the show's soda jerk for the first half of the series, attempting to invent a voice-activated toaster. Fast forward to the present, and while a voice-activated toaster has yet to hit the market, voice-activated devices such as Amazon's Alexa and Google Home suggest Riley was a little over 30 years ahead of his time.
  • The King of Queens:
    • One of Carrie's many grievances with her Cloud Cuckoolander father Arthur is that he blew what would have been her college fund on acquiring the rights to the life story of singer Lou Rawls. Arthur is adamant, in the late 1990s, that this money was not wasted and the tale will one day be told. Carrie is skeptical. Come 2009 and what happens... biographies and a motion picture on the life of Lou Rawls are released. Carrie may yet see her college fund...
    • In one episode, Doug pretends he is a lawyer so he can be part of Carrie's law firm's softball team. Carrie thinks he can't play a lawyer, but he can play a mall cop.
    • The episode 'Pour Judgment': Arthur is running for president of the senior center. The current president's name: George Barksdale. Barksdale is the last name of the Big Bad of the first three seasons of The Wire.
    • At one point in "Hartford Wailer", Huey Lewis calls Spence a rat. Spence is played by Patton Oswalt, who would eventually play an actual rat.
    • In "Fat City", Doug learns that all the women in Carrie's family stay thin until a certain point in their lives, and then gain a lot of weight very fast, which causes Carrie to worry she will end up getting fatter than Doug himself. During the later seasons of the show (6 onward), her actress got pregnant, which caused her character to become almost as fat as Doug himself, (though they poorly tried to hide this on the show with little success).
  • The protagonist of the 1993 TV movie Kiss of a Killer is played by Annette O'Toole, with her mother being played by Eva Marie Saint. Both would go on to play Martha Kent on Smallville and in Superman Returns, respectively. (Bonus points go to the teleplay being written by a David Warfield, the same name as Sam Wanamaker’s tabloid magnate character in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.)

    L-M 
  • The first episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon opened with a sketch that referenced Conan O'Brien taking over The Tonight Show and Jay Leno getting a primetime talk show. It gets funnier when you consider the later kerfuffle with NBC late night:
    Jimmy Fallon: So will you be taking Jay's old dressing room when you go to L.A.?
    [beat]
    Conan O'Brien: Jay isn't leaving.
    • Also Hilarious in Hindsight is the song John Mayer performed on Conan's last episode of Late Night, fittingly titled "L.A.'s Gonna Eat You Alive." (The song starts at around 3:00).
    • During the 2010 Tonight Show squabble, Jimmy said "There's been three hosts of Late Night: David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, and me. And if there's one thing I've learned from Dave and Conan, it's that hosting this show is a one-way ticket to not hosting The Tonight Show." In 2014, Jimmy got selected to be the host of The Tonight Show.
  • Law & Order:
    • A man named Edward Cullen has a much younger girlfriend (they're neither sparkly nor living happily ever after).
    • "Purple Heart" seems like the Downer Ending to The Princess and the Frog, if it hadn't been made circa 1997: An African-American couple consists of a very hard-working woman from a poor background who starts her own restaurant, no thanks to her husband who's always out for a good time and has absolutely no money management sense (the title comes from him delivering expensive contraband beer to cheer up his injured buddy by taking a shortcut through a mine field). She eventually hires two guys (the first one failed) to try and kill him after he maxes out her credit card.
    • On the season 8 episode "Baby, It's You", someone misread the name tag of a certain visiting Baltimore Homicide detective as "Defective Monk". This first aired in 1997, 5 years before the debut of Monk, "the Defective Detective".
    • In a different episode from 1996, a homeless woman mentions having a crush on NY mayor Rudy Giuliani, but Briscoe informed her Giuliani was married. This was years before Giuliani's extremely public affair and subsequent divorce.
    • In the 2003 episode "Sheltered," a boy named Justin Capshaw is abducted and brainwashed into becoming a sniper. Eleven years later, the actor playing Justin would play a character with a somewhat similar backstory.
  • In Lee & Herring's Reasonably Scary Monsters: Richard Herring ponders who would win in a fight between an alien and a predator Stewart Lee then claims this would never happen. This was six years before the film was released.
  • On an episode of Leave It to Beaver, June scolds Wally for using a slang word like "crook" by saying "What if you got to speak to the president?" Years later, President Nixon would insist he was "not a crook".
  • The very short-lived series Legends of the Superheroes featured a scene in one episode in which The Atom revealed that he was dating Giganta. Several years later, in the comics, the "new" Atom (Ryan Choi) was temporarily in a relationship with a then-reformed Giganta.
  • In a Series One episode of Life on Mars, Sam Tyler (John Simm) jokes that he's asked Doctor Who about the time travel situation. Simm's other big role in a BBC drama would turn that into retroactive Celebrity Paradox.
  • A great one crops up in Lois & Clark. The titular characters disguise themselves to speak with someone in prison. Lois uses the name Angel, and during the conversation, she introduces Clark as Spike.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: All of Galadriel's conversations with Halbrand about hunting down Sauron become hilarious after the reveal that he is a Sauron. She repeatedly encourages the Dark Lord to be more ambitious and seek power. Made even funnier by the fact that he kept smirking all the time.
  • In the Spanish cop soap Los Hombres de Paco, in one of Pepa's first episodes, Silvia tells Pepa that she's not into girls and that Pepa should stop hitting on her.... they got married a couple of seasons later.
  • During the final season of Lost, Michael Emerson showed up as a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, revealing that the series was still filming at the time (so neither he nor Jimmy would know the series' ending). At one point, Emerson talked about how he'd mostly done comedies in his theatrical career before TV had typecast him as a creepy villain. Jimmy joked that maybe after Lost was over, Emerson could do a sitcom, "the Hurley and Ben Show!" That joke became much funnier when the Grand Finale aired, revealing that Hurley becomes the Island's new No. 1 while Ben becomes his No. 2.
  • Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade:
    • The cast of Glee getting shot down by NBC to perform at the 2009 edition - that same cast would go on to perform the opening number at the 2011 Emmys... which aired on NBC.
      • Two years later, the Varsity Spirit segment featured the Glee version of "Holding Out For A Hero" (from the episode "Dynamic Duets") as part of a superhero-themed medley. (Which has a bit of Hilarious in Hindsight on its own - they could have used the Bonnie Tyler original but didn't for some reason; the 610 Stompers used the original version for their act in 2011.)
    • In 1989, during The Joker's solo number, he briefly says something about Arnold fighting Batman. 8 years later...
    • At the very end of the 1997 parade, Willard Scott said something to the effect of "I'm not leaving this spot, I'll stay here till next year." In 1998 he was replaced with Matt Lauer as cohost.
    • Speaking of Willard, he just so happened to become a cohost the same year they introduced the first Ronald McDonald balloon - Willard originated the Ronald character for a local McDonald's restaurant. Naturally, he couldn't resist bringing that up.
    • In 2008, during the lull between the Buzz Lightyear balloon and the Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends float, Matt quipped, "Why are we all looking over our shoulders?" and was greeted with a few laughs from his cohosts. After watching the float's appearance, that little line takes on a different meaning.
    • In 1988, during a song by Clifton Davis, Willard has a line about wanting a bass drum for Christmas. The very next year he would show up with one during a song by Scott Bakula. Bonus points for both songs being placed at the same point in both parades (i.e. the end of the first hour).
    • In 1987, Marvel Comics had a float in which several heroes and villains fought to the accompaniment of the Back to the Future theme. The choice of music feels a little less random now that BTTF composer Alan Silvestri has also written themes for some of Marvel Studios' movies, including Captain America: The First Avenger and The Avengers.
  • MADtv: The "Lida and Melina" sketches feature the misadventures of a pair of ghetto Latinas. In one sketch they go to a park where a group of handsome men are lifting weights, and the girls try to land one, only to realize they're all gay. In a later episode from 1999, they meet Ricky Martin after breaking into his hotel room and fangirl all over him. Martin in real life came out as gay in 2010. The girls just can't catch a break.
  • A 1999 episode of Made in Canada revolved around popular film actor Kiefer Sutherland wanting to move on from movies to an action-based television series. Two years later...
  • Malcolm in the Middle:
    • In the episode "Secret Boyfriend" Malcolm is secretly dating a beautiful and brilliant schoolmate who pretends to be a ditz; Drop-In Character Jessica derisively calls her "cheerleader scum!" Jessica's played by Hayden Panettiere, who starred in the third Bring It On film in 2006 as a cheerleader, and in 2009's I Love You, Beth Cooper as a cheerleader. Oh, and this episode first aired in November 2005, about ten months before her Star-Making Role on Heroes as a cheerleader.
    • A very young Dakota Fanning guest stars in an early episode as a little girl who loves to bite Reese.
    • A flashback on a season seven episode showed Hal bald and next to a chemistry set after Malcolm (as a child) blew up the kitchen. Gee, Hal shown as a bald man next to a highly dangerous chemistry set. Where have I seen that before?
      • Other moments that are now funny due to Bryan Cranston going from playing Bumbling Dad Hal to morally gray, cancer-stricken chemistry teacher-cum-meth maker Walt White: one episode had Hal worried that he may have cancer and tries to keep it a secret from the family, and another episode where Hal is busted on drug-dealing charges after Reese falls for a young narc.
    • At the end of one episode, Malcolm questions Lois's authority and asks if she intends to control his life when he's 30 years old and married. In a separate entire episode, he spends the entire episode pondering what he wants to do with his life, but at the end of the episode, decides he'll just continue being a kid while he still is one. As the last episode reveals, the answer to the former episode's question was "yes", and the point of the latter was moot to begin with because his whole family planned his future out for him from the very beginning.
  • During the short run of the infamous Manimal, it often received ribbing on Late Night with David Letterman. During one segment, a psychic was brought in to determine the show's future, and the verdict was "nope, not on another network, not in syndication, not on home cassettes...it's a ghost, it's history, it's vapor." The "not on home cassettes" part became partially wrong when the show was released on DVD for the first time ever in 2012 by Fabulous Films (in the PAL region, the American part of the show's ironic fanbase had to wait until 2015 for Shout Factory to release it). And the "it's a ghost, it's history, it's vapor" part? The show is a Cult Classic now. We presume that psychic is now flipping burgers somewhere.
  • David Andrews starred in Mann & Machine as a policeman partnered with a sexy gynoid. He would go on to appear in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, in which the main antagonist was a sexy gynoid.
  • The premise of the Netflix Original Marriage or Mortgage has soon to be wed contestants decide if they want to use their limited savings to buy a dream home to live in or an extravagant wedding plan instead. As the show finished filming in early 2020 and aired in 2021, the entire premise manages to be hilarious in hindsight on release as episodes where the couples choose a fancy wedding end with disclaimers that those plans had to be cancelled because of Covid-19.
  • Married... with Children:
    • Season 6's "The Egg and I" begins with Al trying to pay his taxes and pretending to hang himself (he already had a noose around his neck), crying, "I don't wanna be on ABC!" Then along came Ed O'Neill's cameo on 8 Simple Rules (during the episodes after John Ritter died) and his new starring role on Modern Family, both of which are ABC shows.
    • In "Damn Bundys" (1997) Al goes to Hell. There he has the following conversation with the devil:
      Al: Hey Lou. I want my soul back.
      Lou: I want my soul back, I want my soul back. It's all I hear from you and Tiger Woods.
      Al: Tiger Woods sold his soul?
      Lou: Of course. You don't think anybody's really that good, do you?
    • What makes this line so amusing is that Tiger Woods had a clean-cut good image for years until his adultery scandal in 2009. Seems that selling his soul had a downside after all...
    • Bud once called Kelly a future single mother. Christina Applegate portrays one in Jesse.
    • The Simpsons: David Faustino was announced as the star of a Show Within a Show titled "Talk to the Hand". Well, Bud is certainly no stranger to that.
    • Season 1's "Nightmare on Al's Street" has Peg mention that Al is banned from Wrigley Field because he once interfered with a ball that prevented the Cubs from reaching the World Series. Other than the "banned from Wrigley" part, this is pretty much the story of Steve Bartman in the 2003 National League Championship Series, sixteen years after that episode aired.
  • One of Tex Baxter's ideas in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, was to host the news in front of a live audience. Mary and her co-workers rejected the idea. Now, there are quite a few news shows, like The Daily Show, that have a live audience.
  • Masters of Horror: In 2017, on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, Trevor Noah mocked allegations by the new President Donald Trump of massive voter fraud because dead people were registered to vote, commenting that "Dead people getting up to vote? That's the weirdest episode of The Walking Dead ever!" That's essentially the whole plot of this series' episode "Homecoming", made about a decade earlier, in which zombified U.S. soldiers rise from the dead to voice their discontent through the electoral process.
  • The Middle:
    • In the first season episode "The Neighbor", Sue and Carly try to beat the Glossners in a fight after the latter challenges to one by a dance-off, not knowing what a fight really entails. Eden Sher, who plays Sue, went on to voice Star Butterfly, the title character of Star vs. the Forces of Evil, who has no such problems in knowing how to fight and can be excessive at times, especially in the episode "School Spirit", where she had... the exact opposite problem when it came to football, initially thinking it was a blood sport, donning battle armor, thinking a trophy case is a memorial, and mining and laying traps in a football field.
    • The final episode ends with Sue marrying Sean while Lexie is pregnant with Axl's child. In real life, Beau Wirick, who played Sean, married Daniela Bobadilla, who played Lexie, the same year that the show ended.
  • One early episode of The Mighty Boosh features a guest character who is an eerily accurate retroactive Sarah Palin expy, in terms of looks. This would have been an example in its own right - but the fact that she appears for the first time immediately after Howard Moon utters the line "the man, the myth, the maverick" had me in stitches.
    • Even funnier? She's a zookeeper (though it's reptiles so not as funny).
  • In Misfits, when asked why he bothers to try and rescue Simon from danger, Nathan replies: "The little bastard gets under your skin, doesn't he?". A couple of years later, Iwan Rheon, the actor playing Simon, joined the cast of Game of Thrones as Ramsay Snow, Lord Bolton's bastard who enjoys flaying people alive.
  • Mr. Show:
  • Mock the Week, "Unlikely things to hear on a TV election debate," at the start of 2010:
    Andy Parsons: "The lines have closed. Gordon, it could be you. David, it could be you. Nick, it's not gonna be you."
  • In a first-season episode of Monk, a person of interest asks whether he's psychic, and Sharona quips "he's a psychic who doesn't believe in psychics." Four years later, it begins being paired with Psych, whose main character uses the skill Monk used to have... to pose as a psychic.
    • Also, Tony Shalhoub's role as OCD Adrian makes Ian Stark's claim that he once had OCD much more amusing. Of course, Ian Stark cured his OCD through hypnosis, but when Monk tried doing that in "Mr. Monk Gets Hypnotized," it didn't go as planned.
    • John Michael Higgins appeared in season 3 as a disgraced game show host, which turned out to be pretty good practice for his real gig hosting America Says.
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus:
    • Back in 1969, the sketch ("THE WORLD AROUND US: The Mouse Problem") involved a subculture of men that liked dressing up as mice. At the time, it was a satire of the treatment of homosexuals; nowadays, with the whole Furry Fandom thing, it just gets funnier. It should go without saying, however, that some trolls claim it was a warning against the furry fandom's impending creation.
    • Also, the sketch where a gorilla is applying for a job as a librarian, to which he is ideally suited until he reveals himself as a man in a suit. Discworld used an orangutan, admittedly....
    • The "Science Fiction Sketch" has a man named Harold Potter who, despite being English, goes to Scotland for supernatural reasons. note  This may however be a deliberate reference since the Harry Potter series has a number of other Monty Python references.
    • From the same sketch: Scotland is the worst tennis-playing nation in the world.
    • And then there's the Verrifast Airline sketch, which pre-dates many of the shadier charter and low-price airline companies by about thirty years, and arguably becomes even funnier in the light of, say, Ryanair.
    • The "Australian Philosopher's Sketch" gets its humor from the absurdity of having stereotypical louts in "Crocodile" Dundee outfits teaching Hegel and Plato. In the past few decades, some of the most influential philosophers - notably Peter Singer and David Chalmers - have come from Australia.
    • Longcat first appeared as a kaiju-like beast in the Terry Gilliam sketch "Killer Cars", decades before LOLCats became a thing.
  • In an episode of Moonlight, Josef knocks on Mick's freezer, waking him up. Mick's response? "Don't tell me, it's Twilight."
  • Mork & Mindy:
    • A blooper reel from 1978 (WARNING: NSFW language and brief nudity that you probably don't want to see) is all the more hilarious due to a young (and possibly coked-up) Robin Williams lamenting, "I see my whole career flashing before me" and "A brief moment of silence for my career".
    • One clip has Williams telling Pam Dawber that "someday you'll have a career of your own, and you won't need me anymore." And, though she's running under the pop-culture radar, she does: she's kept rather active.
    • In the beginning of "Putting The Ork Back In Mork", Mork has forgotten how to be Orkan and turned, well, bland. His hair is very, very short and he wears glasses... and he looks almost exactly like Robin Williams did later in life. Maybe Robin hasn't forgotten how to be an Orkan, but he sure has made it clear that he just doesn't want to be one. If only there was some way to turn him back...
    • Long, long before Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet status:
      Mork: I've been to all the planets in your solar system.
      Exidor: Mars? Mercury? Pluto?
      Mork: Oh, don't ever go to Pluto — it's a Mickey Mouse planet.
  • A skit at the 2008 MTV Movie Awards has Ben Stiller trying to make a viral video to promote Tropic Thunder. As the bit starts, he has a hard time getting Robert Downey Jr.'s attention because he's reading a trade paper... with a front-page story noting that Iron Man has grossed $3 billion. Well, it wasn't that successful — but as of 2013 the four movies featuring Tony Stark and his suit(s) have amassed more than $3 billion total, with The Avengers and Iron Man 3 pulling in $1 billion each. It just took some patience!
    • At the 2000 MTV Movie Awards, there was a skit with Stiller as "Tom Crooze", Tom Cruise's fictitious stunt double for Mission: Impossible II, in which Crooze goes all-out in Method Acting, asking himself "Who is Tom Cruise? What is Tom Cruise? And why is Tom... Cruise?", which has become funnier in light of both Tropic Thunder, in which Stiller has to deal with Robert Downey, Jr.'s character, who also goes to absurd lengths in method acting, as well as Avengers: Endgame, in which Tony Stark asks "Who is Gamora?", with Drax saying "I'll do YOU one better: WHY is Gamora?".
  • In the second episode of My Babysitter's a Vampire, "Three Cheers for Evil", Benny and Ethan disguise themselves as girls to sneak into the cheer team in order to prevent Erica from capturing the souls of the student body. While disguised, they take on the aliases of Betty and Veronica, a clear reference to the homonymous Archie Comics characters. Six years later, Vanessa Morgan, who played the titular vampire babysitter Sarah on the show, would become directly tied to Archie Comics by being cast as Toni Topaz in Riverdale.
  • MythBusters examples:
    • In one of the "Myths Revisited" episodes, the narrator makes a comment about Tory having "about as much lift as a lead balloon". In a later episode, the MythBusters built a lead balloon and made it float.
    • From an episode first aired a full year before the Arnold Schwarzenegger lovechild scandal:
      Adam: Is this the first Terminator you've cooked?
      Jamie: [stirring a pot of hot lead] No, every time a robot misbehaves... [motions to the melting pot]
    • In the 2010 "Bug Special", Jamie commented that the physics of a swarm of bees lifting a laptop is the same as someone propelling a sailboat he's in by blowing on the sail — you won't go anywhere. In 2011, a build team test showed that you actually can move a sailboat that way (though it's very inefficient, and takes a really big sail).

    N-S 
  • NCIS:
    • "Sometimes, McGee," Gibbs says at the end of the episode "Twisted Sister," "a little lie is good for the soul." The episode is about McGee's sister Sarah getting involved with a murder, and she's played by Troian Bellisario... who now knows a lot about little lies. Plus she gets the "camera sound, picture goes to black and white" freeze-frame at the end, which underlines the point.
    • Michael Weatherly, Agent Anthony Dinozzo, married an oncologist Sept '09. His character was seriously dating to a doctor on the show! (Though hopefully his real-life marriage won't end like his character's!)
    • There is some speculation from the fans that Mark Harmon uses a flip phone like his TV character Gibbs, who also using a flip phone. But it turns out, according to one Facebook user, Harmon ACTUALLY uses an iPhone, which is ironic since Gibbs dislikes modern smartphones and he hasn't kept himself up with the modern high-tech technology. Plus, Gibbs uses a decade-old flip phone whereas Mark Marmon uses an iPhone. Weird....
  • In Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide, Black and Nerdy Teen Genius Cookie's glasses seem to be fully functional web browsers and have a fair amount of other technology as well. Cue Google launching its prototype Glass five years later, making this an unintentional case of life imitating art as well.
  • One Nickelodeon special from January 2004, just after the Spirit and Opportunity rovers landed on Mars, featured two celebrities having five minutes to build any sort of contraption out of some random materials on a table. One guy made a very dumpy-looking car-like thing out of straws and gum, with waffles for wheels. When the host asked him what it was, he said "A Mars rover." "Do you think this thing could really go to Mars?" "This is the one that's been having problems." (Spirit had a computer problem at the time.) During this exchange, the thing starts to fall apart. Flash forward six years, and Spirit and Opportunity are still roving, despite being made to last only 3 months.
  • On the 2006 Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards, which aired on April Fools' Day, they joked that president George W. Bush was going to host the pre-show special. Six years later, president Barack Obama's wife Michelle did appear on the 2012 Kids' Choice Awards to promote The Big Help.
  • A first season episode of Night Court has Assistant District Attorney Dan Fielding bragging that he once met Donald Rumsfeld. Not such a big deal in the 80s, when the episode aired, and Rumsfeld had been out of the limelight for years, but a lot funnier when the DVD was released in the 2000s, when Rumsfeld was going through the Abu Ghraib controversy and all over the news.
  • The Noddy Shop:
    • The show features a crustacean character named Johnny Crawfish who claims to have a family and sang rock and roll songs. Eighteen years later, Moana featured a character named Tamatoa who sang a rock and roll song and said that he had a grandma. He even does a dance similar to Johnny's in the theme song of the show.
    • Another character on the show is Planet Pup, a robotic toy dog who wants to be a superhero. Nineteen years later, PAW Patrol had a Sixth Ranger named Robo-Dog, who is an actual robot dog superhero.
    • In one episode, "Big Bullies", there's a bully named Butch. Sixteen years after the episode premiered, Cool Cat Saves the Kids would also feature a character with the same traits.
  • Northern Exposure: In early season 3, Ed and Ruth-Anne praise Spike Lee as a great filmmaker but think that he'll improve once he inevitably grows out of his "preachy" phase. Thirty years later, both Lee's insistence on attacking social issues and the reception of his movies have only gotten better.
  • NUMB3RS: The final scene of "Conspiracy Theory has conspiracy theorist Roy McGill defending his conspiracy theory that the Super Bowl is fixed, tells Liz Warner to "take the points, hit the over" for the next Super Bowl. While it's not exactly a prophet-level prediction - over/under is a binary choice and the dividing line is reasonably set at a point where either option is reasonably plausible, so even a random guess has a decent chance of coming up correct - in the subsequent Super Bowl (XLIII), betting over on points actually would have been a winning betnote .
  • Odd Squad:
    • Season 1 features a main character named Olive, known for being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold and a Deadpan Snarker. Six years after the show premiered, another PBS Kids show would have a main character going by the same name and with a completely different personality.
    • "The Jackies", one of the first episodes of the show, revolves around Precinct 13579 attempting to win their first Jackalope Award since their founding back in the times of the cavemen, and fight against Orville, the Director of the precinct in the next town over, to win it. After many trials and tribulations, they secure their first win. Setting aside the fact that the Jackie Awards are meant to be a parody of the Emmy Awards, the show itself would not only manage to win two Daytime Emmys the following year, but it would also be nominated for, and win, numerous Daytime Emmys every single year thereafter. And that's not counting the numerous other accolades the show has gotten thus far.
    • The episode "Moustache Confidential" has a consistent Running Gag of Orchid giving an Evil Laugh of "Wa-ha-ha, wa-ha-ha-ha-ha!" Two seasons later, that laugh would become the signature Evil Laugh of resident Enfant Terrible Big Bad The Shadow.
    • Orson, one of the youngest agents of Odd Squad at infancy, was revealed in Season 2 to be one of the two Precinct 13579 agents who could drive the ice crean truck van. One year after the season premiered, Baby Driver came out, although the title's definitely not taken literally.
    • In "Oscar of All Trades", Oscar explains to Olive how he worked as an Odd Squad greeter and tells two Investigation agents walking into the bullpen to "keep on keepin' on!" This was a good ten months before OddTube would have Olympia, and later Orla, adopt the punny Catchphrase of "Keep on keepin' odd".
    • Otto asking Olive how Odd Squad plans to beat Odd Todd in "Training Day", followed by her worriedly remarking that she doesn't know, takes on a very hilarious meaning given that the season finale, "O is Not For Over", had Otto be the one who beat Odd Todd so badly that he ended up going through a Heel–Face Return.
    • "Soundcheck Part Deux", the sequel episode to "Soundcheck", involves Danny T., the lead singer of Soundcheck, being separated from his bandmates, with Olive and Otto helping him to bring the band back together. Although this is an inverted plotline from "Soundcheck", the Season 3 episode "Music of Sound" would end up having a similar plotline, only with the Mobile Unit instead of Olive and Otto and someone unintentionally breaking the band up rather than the band members bringing it upon themselves.
    • The episode "Assistant's Creed" introduces a character named Olympia, an assistant of Oprah's who longs for adventure and decides to break the rules by sneaking out of Headquarters and helping clients in need. Fast-forward to Season 2, which has a main character named Olympia with a similar personality but in a much higher rank in the Odd Squad hierarchy, being an Investigation agent. This was certainly not lost on the writers — the episode "Other Olympia" covers the two Olympias (with the Olympia from "Assistant's Creed" now an Investigation agent) doing battle with each other over having the same first name, with main-character Olympia getting increasingly frustrated over former-assistant Olympia stealing her thunder since the latter has been with Odd Squad longer.
    • Odelia is the name of a Lab Director introduced in the Season 1 episode "Worst First Day Ever", where she helped Ori with gathering loose Centigurps. Olympia is the name of an Investigation agent introduced in Season 2 as a main character...who was originally going to be named Odelia.
  • The Office (US):
    • In the episode "The Merger", Michael stabs the tires of the other employees to get them to unite against Vance Refrigeration. When they get annoyed and leave, he says:
      Michael: This is egregious! This is egregious!
    • In the episode "Gossip," Michael spreads a bunch of false rumors in an effort to destroy the credibility of the one he knew was true at the time (that Stanley was having an affair). When the staff gets together to try to trace some of the rumors, Kevin says that the rumor about him was that there was a little person inside of him working him with controls. This would later become the premise of the Pixar film Inside Out, whose stars included Phyllis Smith and Mindy Kaling.
    • In "Stairmaggedon", just a few episodes from the end, Stanley tells Dwight "You are not my boss, and never will be". In the second-last episode, Dwight becomes manager. Though the finale shows Stanley retired very shortly thereafter.
    • Similarly, back in "Beach Games", there is one scene where Andy and Dwight are competing against each other after Michael revealed that he's using the events as the basis for who gets his job. Cue a talking head with Oscar where he says that he'll quit if either of them are made manager. Both Andy and Dwight have held the Regional Manager position since then (Granted, Andy gets significant Character Development first), and Oscar's still around at the end of the series.
    • In season 4's "Chair Model", Jim jokes about setting up Michael with Pam's mom. The two ended up dating for real in season 6, much to Pam's dismay.
    • In a Season 9 episode, Clark shows his disdain for the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise. Deleted scenes in the finale show him flirting with a new co-worker played by the film's leading lady, Dakota Johnson.
    • David Denman, Roy's actor, played another role just like Roy: an awful boyfriend engaged to a girl who was the apple of a much nicer man's eye and eventually lost to him.
    • In "The Chump"note , there was a joke about a Billy Joel Rock Band game - something which, at the time, couldn't happen, because Billy Joel didn't allow his music to be used in either Rock Band or Guitar Hero at the time. Not only did Billy Joel's musicnote  appear as Downloadable Content over 3 months later in Rock Band 3, but according to Billy Joel himself, he did so because of the joke; he read a review of the episode where the reviewer said "God forbid that should ever happen"note , and Billy Joel got on the phone and told his people to get him in the latest Rock Band gamenote . However, a Billy Joel Rock Band in the same vein as The Beatles: Rock Band or Green Day: Rock Band, which is more likely what the critic was actually referring to, still has not happened (or, for that matter, a Guitar Hero game in the same vein).
    • When the "Niagara" episode aired in 2009, Meemaw showed disdain for watching Charlie Rose on TV. It's likely he was a mere random target. But in 2017, Rose, who worked for PBS and additionally CBS, made some sexually inappropriate behavior, and both networks canned him. Again, it's coincidental... unless Meemaw was on to something.
    • The pre-credits gag from "Trivia"note  unintentionally foreshadowed John Krasinski's A Quiet Place.
    • The Sabre company debuts a triangle-shaped tablet called the Pyramid, and Ryan's presentation (given by Jim) at the opening of Sabre's first retail store puts a lot of emphasis on real-life pyramids built throughout history. In Horizon Zero Dawn, electronics/robotics manufacturer Faro Automated Solutions has a pyramid logo and its CEO holed himself up in a pyramid-shaped bunker to ride out a Robot War apocalypse that he himself was indirectly responsible for.
    • This quote from Dwight, now that Rainn Wilson has voiced Lex Luthor in the DC Animated Movie Universe.
      Dwight: And in conclusion, I think that Lex Luthor said it best when he said "Dad, you have no idea what I'm capable of".
    • John Krasinski played Jim, who's pretty hopeless even with his beloved sniper rifle in Call of Duty. Now that Krasinski's done 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (alongside Roy's actor David Denman no less) and Jack Ryan, he's clearly doing a lot better with a gun.
  • Star Trek (2009) had Jennifer Morrison as the mother of James T. Kirk, naming him after her father. Fast forward to 2012, where in Once Upon a Time, she is the long-lost daughter of Snow White and her husband, Prince Charming...whose first name is James.
  • Robin Askwith's portrayal of Harvey Micklethwaite in On the House as a long-haired layabout isn't too dissimilar to the role of Timmy Lea from the Confessions of a... Series, which would become Askwith's best known role.
  • Only Fools and Horses:
    • In "It Never Rains...", Grandad mentions a friend called Nobby Clarke. Kenneth MacDonald, who played Mike from "Who's a Pretty Boy?" to "Time On Our Hands", played a character by that name in It Ain't Half Hot, Mum.
    • In the 1992 Christmas special "Mother Nature's Son", the Trotters attempt to pass off tap water as "Peckham Spring Water" — it glows in the dark due to dangerous contaminants. Coca-Cola would proceed to do this when it launched Dasani in the UK. That, and the discovery of carcinogens led to the product being pulled.
      • When Dasani was found to be just filtered mains water, it got nicknamed "Sidcup Spring" after this episode and the location of the Dasani bottling plant.
      • Which just adds to the parallels with the episode, since Del managed to pollute the 'Peckham Spring' water with some chemical dumped in the reservoir (that caused the water to literally glow in the dark).
    • In "Dates", Raquel mentions that until that point her career highlight had been a small role in an episode of Doctor Who — which was intended to show how spectacularly unsuccessful she had been as an actress, since the show's ratings and reputation were a complete joke by that point, and it would be cancelled just under a year later. Exactly 25 years later the actress who played Raquel, Tessa Peake-Jones appeared in "The Time of the Doctor", with the show's reputation pretty much the opposite of what it was when Raquel first appeared.
  • At the 2018 Oscars, Jimmy Kimmel joked that Timothée Chalamet was "missing PAW Patrol to be here tonight". At the time, neither Nickelodeon nor the Nick Jr. channel aired PAW Patrol on weekends note , and the timeslot against the Oscars that year was a marathon of Peppa Pig. Come 2019, and the episodes "Pups Party with Bats; Pups Save Sensei Yumi" and "Pups Save A Friend; Pups Save A Stowaway" actually air against the final hour of the Oscars. And then the official Paw Patrol Twitter page posted this on the day of the ceremony.
  • An early Peter Kay routine involved him demonstrating the concept of "literal dancing" using a certain Rick Astley song. The rise of the rickroll has made this even funnier than it was originally.
  • If you heard the title Playboy After Dark, what would you guess it was? Some hardcore porn block on the Playboy Channel, no doubt. You could hardly be more wrong — it was a syndicated show that Hugh Hefner hosted from 1969 to 1970 that featured interviews with celebrity guests at the Playboy Mansion as well as musical guests performing. Even more amazing, it was a follow-up to a similar show from ten years earlier called Playboy's Penthouse, another combination of words that sounds dirtier in hindsight and something you'd never expect to have been on TV when it was due to the association with Hefner's brand.
    • Playboy's Penthouse got an extra layer of hilarity added to it after Bob Guccione launched Penthouse magazine in 1965 as Playboy's direct competitor.
  • Detractors often accused Pope Benedict XVI of (among other things) Nazi sympathies (it doesn't help that, accusations of Naziism aside, he was part of the Hitler Youth during World War II). Shortly after the Pope's resignation at the end of February 2013, it was announced that the Führer himself would be TV Land's next Pope for a Showtime series called The Vatican. In Pope Benedict's defence, it was, if not compulsory, at least advisory, to be a member of the Hitler Youth at that time. And that the entire Ratzinger family hated the Nazis, and so young Josef did only the absolute bare minimum with the group to keep his family out of trouble and blew the Hitler Youth off the rest of the time.
  • In the first series of Prime Suspect, Jane Tennyson (played by Helen Mirren) says this line "And don't call me ma'am. I'm not the bloody Queen." Fifteen years later, she did play the bloody Queen, twice, both Elizabeth I and II in the same year.
  • Police, Camera, Action! had made itself quite Hilarious in Hindsight, considering how much the 1995-1996 series mentioned Essex, a good 16-17 years before The Only Way Is Essex premiered. Granted, it wasn't about the younger crowd, more the Essex Police, but still, the locations would end up being familiar to today's audiences. The scene in the 1995 episode "Safety Last" (made July 1995) is set in the exact location that Lauren Goodger works in. Hilarious in Hindsight indeed.
  • An episode of Popular opens with Mary Cherry auditioning for a singing show called Teen Tartz in front of a panel of 3 judges. At the time, they were trying to ape the reality show "Popstars", but now it looks like a prophetic version of American Idol.
  • Power Rangers:
    • Back in the second season of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers', Rita Repulsa married Lord Zedd. When he suggested they have a child together she freaked out for a moment. Fast-forward to Power Rangers Operation Overdrive and the 15th-anniversary special "Once A Ranger": The villain of the special is... drumroll, please... Rita and Zedd's son.
    • Also in Power Rangers in Space, when Astronema is seen through her attempt to impersonate Ashley, she quickly responds, "I wouldn't want to be a Power Ranger anyway!" Come Power Rangers Lost Galaxy, the reformed Astronema, now Karone, becomes the second Pink Galaxy Ranger.
      • Speaking of In Space, the Trope Naming Psycho Rangers introduce themselves with boasts, with the Blue Psycho Ranger saying they're smarter than the Power Rangers. Psycho Blue was voiced by Wally Wingert, who'd provide voices for the Batman: Arkham Series. Take a wild guess which Bat-villain he voiced.
    • Lothor comments in one episode of Power Rangers Ninja Storm (on a monster of his growing, a recurring trope in the franchise) that "What did you expect? He wasn't going to get smaller!" Later, in Rockman 4 Minus ∞, the final bosses are just smaller versions of the eight robot masters.
    • At one point in Power Rangers Beast Morphers, Robo-Roxy states bringing back Lord Zedd would be a bad idea as he'd turn on Evox. Power Rangers Dino Fury sees that, despite the foresight of using a compliance collar, Reghoul didn't get this memo. Guess what happens the moment Zedd's off the collar.
  • In the mid-nineties series Prey there is a character, an evolutionary anthropologist, named Ann Coulter.
  • In The Prisoner (1967) episode "The Chimes Of Big Ben", Number Two dreams of seeing the village as a One World Order, to which Number Six sarcastically tells him that he could be the first man on the moon. Guess who beats him to the punch 21 months later on July 20, 1969...
  • In the teaser for Psych's season 2, Shawn and his black best friend Gus, who run the eponymous Phony Psychic detective agency, recreate portions of the "Ebony and Ivory" video, including the line "Stick together in per-fect har-mony". The actual trailer for the season promptly revealed that Gus is leaving Psych. That situation lasted for only one episode and culminated in Shawn blackmailing Gus' boss. Though the line is actually "Ebony and ivory sit together in perfect harmony on my piano keyboard; oh lord, why don't we?", which makes perfect sense if you've ever seen Gus and Shawn work together.
  • On Punk'd, Ashton routinely began referring to himself as "The Farmhand" while pranking pro-wrestlers. Cue a few years later, he is one in Netflix's The Ranch.
  • One contestant on The $100,000 Pyramid who was simply a housewife listed her occupation as "domestic goddess", which obviously confused host Dick Clark. She clarified, and since then, it became sort of a Running Gag for Pyramid contestants who were housewives to introduce themselves that way. Two months after The $100,000 Pyramid was cancelled, Kösuke Fujishima would create a literal domestic goddess (though, much to longtime readers' chagrin, she's still not a housewife yet...)
  • In the Quantum Leap episode "All-Americans," there's a scene where Sam asks Al where he has been; Al says that he was watching Super Bowl XXX and the Steelers were down by 3. This episode originally aired in January of 1990. Super Bowl XXX was played six years later on January 28, 1996. The Pittsburgh Steelers lost to the Dallas Cowboys 27-17. The Steelers were down by 3 twice in that game.
  • In the The Random Years episode "Men Behaving Sadly", Todd (played by Sean Murray) gives Wiseman a slap on the back of the head. Just one year and eight months later, Murray would debut on a series know for the Gibbs head slap.
  • Reading Rainbow featured books that were part of two franchises which would later be adapted into their own PBS Kids programs: Arthur and The Magic School Bus.
  • The Reba episode, "Locked and Loaded", the titular character makes a crack involving Kelly Clarkson. Guess who guest-stars in literally the next episode, "As We Forgive Those..."
  • The 1997 TV version of Rebecca. Or – the antagonism between Olenna Tyrell and Tywin Lannister, culminating in her burning down his house.
    • Especially Tywin looks like a terribly Darker and Edgier version of Maxim de Winter. Maxim is very rich, aloof, and seemingly can’t get over his wife’s early death, and then marries a girl much younger and poorer than himself – Tywin is very rich, aloof, and seemingly can’t get over his wife’s early death, and then a young lowborn prostitute is found in his bed. Each of them had a wife who slept with her first cousin (although, in Tywin’s case, he was the cousin in question). Each of them has had a loving relationship with a golden-haired wife and a loveless one with a black-haired amoral woman. Both the black-haired women delivered a humiliating speech and were strangled.
  • Red Dwarf:
    • In "Parallel Universe" the crew travel to an Alternate Universe and meet genderswapped versions of themselves. The female Rimmer is (very unsuccessfully) hitting on the male Rimmer, and at one point the male Rimmer explains to Lister that she's now "gone to get some sexy videos — she seems to think that seeing two men together might turn me on". This is supposed to just be another hilarious gender-reversed version of a real-world phenomenon (specifically heterosexual men liking female-homosexual pornography) but it's a lot funnier because of the changes since 1988: Female Rimmer is just a Yaoi Fangirl!
    • Then there's the bit in "D.N.A." when Lister tells a story of how he saw the simplicity of a squirrel's life and wished that his life could be the same. Then Rimmer facetiously asks if Lister's a "closet squirrel" who likes to parade around with a strap-on bushy tail calling himself "Nutkin". As with the above example, this is a lot funnier now due to the Furry Fandom.
  • An advert for the first season of Robot Wars narrated by Norman Lovett (Holly in Red Dwarf) becomes pretty amusing when you take into account that Craig Charles took over as presenter in season 2.
  • Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In had "News of the Future" as one of its recurring skits, usually a round number of years from the airdate. A 1968 episode had a news bulletin from 1988 that "President Ronald Reagan denies that he is a candidate for Governor of California"—at the time, an obvious reference to the then-governor's failed bid to be the Republican candidate for the 1968 election, but in 1988, he was finishing up his second term as president and ineligible to continue running...
  • Sabrina the Teenage Witch:
    • In a season 2 episode Sabrina makes a throwaway joke "you must be confusing me with my Evil Twin, usually she's a brunette". The season 3 finale reveals that all Spellman witches have evil twins.
    • Season 3's "Suspicious Minds" features the class being paired up for a marriage simulation assignment. Sabrina's 'marriage' to Gordy falls apart because she acts so jealous towards Harvey's marriage to Libby. In the season finale Sabrina calls off her own wedding because she still loves Harvey.
    • In "To Tell A Mortal" Sabrina gets abruptly zapped to Alaska, ditching Valerie by accident. In season 4 Valerie gets Put on a Bus to Alaska.
    • Season 1 reveals that Zelda married a Renaissance musician, while Hilda's groom left her at the altar. By the end of season 6, it's Hilda that gets Happily Married while Zelda's romantic fate is unresolved.
  • Saved by the Bell (2020) has an episode in Season 2 where Zack Morris (by now, the Governor of California) is thrown out of office following a recall election. Around the time of that episode's premiere, real-life California Governor Gavin Newsom managed to stay in office after an attempted recall failed.
  • Scrubs:
    • In one episode, J.D. does a voice-over for a fake commercial and then remarks "Wouldn't I be a great spokesperson for things?" He later voiced the Cottonelle Puppy and PuR water filter in commercials.
    • Also the Janitor mentions that "we should be looking for Osama bin Laden in Pakistan". Guess where we found Bin Laden in 2011?
      • The very next day after Bin Laden's death (meaning it was written and filmed weeks before) Chuck had Casey planning on using pictures of bin Laden for target practice.
    • Season 4's "My Life In Four Cameras" has JD imagine life in the hospital as a sitcom complete with bold colour scheme, corny jokes, and a whole lot of slapstick. Fast forward to season 6 where the show itself is very much like the very thing it was parodying in that episode.
    • Dr. Cox had a shaved head throughout season 6 and in one episode, Dr. Kelso asked him if he would be fighting Superman. John C. McGinley would later voice a Superman villain in the Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, but alas, it was Metallo, not Lex Luthor.
  • SCTV had a recurring segment, The Gerry Todd Show, with Rick Moranis as the host of a program that played Music Videos. Since those sketches first aired the same year MTV debuted (1981), it's natural to assume they were parodies of MTV, but in fact the sketches all originally aired before MTV debuted on August 1st. Moranis used to be a radio DJ and came up with the idea of a VJ who played videos, unaware that a network (also created by former radio people) was being planned around this same concept.
    • Also, given the subsequent use of Michael McDonald as a humor trope (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Yacht Rock), the Gerry Todd Show sketch making fun of McDonald seems prescient.
    • SCTV had a commercial parody advertising an album called Stairways To Heaven, with various unlikely performers covering "Stairway To Heaven" ("30 great artists, one great song"). A decade later there was an actual Stairways To Heaven album built around the same idea (with covers done In the Style of other artists). In addition, one of the great artists mentioned in the advert - Dolly Parton - would eventually do a cover of that classic song.
    • And then there's this clip. If you're a Hetalia fan, you'll find it funny for entirely different reasons. (Plus, the host's name is Feliks... which is also the "human name" for Poland in the anime.)
  • Second Chance: The pilot episode (about an old man who is too good for Hell but not good enough for Heaven, so is sent back to Earth to make his teen self slightly less sinful) has a throwaway joke of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi being judged after his death, with the date given as July 29, 2011. Twenty-four years later, by coincidence, Gaddafi's death occurred within three months of the "predicted" date.
  • Seinfeld:
    • In the Season 7 episode "The Wink", George Steinbrenner gives a rundown of all the managers he's fired, mentioning Billy Martin's name four times. He concludes by mentioning Buck Showalter (the then-current Yankees manager), then quickly clams up about it. "George, you didn't hear that from me!" Mere weeks after the episode aired, Showalter was let go and replaced with Joe Torre.
    • In the 1993 episode, "The Masseuse," Elaine tries in vain for her new boyfriend Joel Rifkin, an avid sports fan, to change at least his first name to differentiate himself from the serial killer Joel Rifkin. At one point, she starts suggesting names inspired by popular sports stars. One of those suggestions? OJ—as in OJ Simpson, who at that time was nothing but a beloved former football star. Seven months later, OJ Simpson would become infamous for allegedly murdering his former wife and another man — much more so than Joel Rifkin, who has been mostly forgotten in the eyes of pop culture.
    • And again in 1997, Elaine has her new boyfriend leave her and loses her job because she cannot stand future best picture The English Patient, which everyone else loves. Two decades later, the handful that even remember the film would probably agree with her.
    • In the episode "The Contest", Jerry watches Tiny Toon Adventures on Nickelodeon. While the show was only aired on FOX Kids back then, it did show up on Nickelodeon three years later in 1995, and after a brief hiatus to show other Warner Brothers shows, it returned in 2003.
  • A Ukrainian comedy called Servant of the People sees a man played by Volodymyr Zelenskyy become the Ukrainian President. Not long after the series ended, Zelenskyy would go from playing the Ukrainian President to actually being him. Even moreso is that the fictional protagonist wins the election with 67% of the vote, a landslide. Zelenskyy won the real-life election with an even bigger landslide, with 72% of the vote.
  • Bill Grundy's notorious interview with the Sex Pistols caused widespread public outrage in 1976 when it set a record for televised profanity. Now in the 21st century, it comes across as funny, as do the newspaper headlines that followed.
  • Alan van Sprang plays Valentine Morgenstern in Shadowhunters, while Jonathan Rhys Meyers played him in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. Both actors starred in The Tudors together.
  • Sharpe: In Sharpe's Eagle, Sharpe (Sean Bean) gets into a fistfight with minor villain Lt. Berry, played by a young Daniel Craig. So we have future Bond villain Alec Trevalyen sparring against a future James Bond, respectively. What's even funnier is the GoldenEye video game received a remake for Craig's Bond.
  • In the 2012 Sherlock episode "The Hounds of Baskerville", reference is made to Sherlock losing a game of Cluedo because he insists that Dr Black committed suicide. Later that year, after "The Reichenbach Fall" was broadcast, a Sherlock themed version of Cluedo was released in which the victim was Jim Moriarty - who in the series definitely did commit suicide.
  • One episode of the Granada Sherlock Holmes series features a very, very young Jude Law as a stable boy. (In drag, no less.) Fast-forward to 2009... and who's playing Watson?
  • Clark Gregg appeared on The Shield for several episodes. A few years later, he was in the Iron Man films as an agent of... you guessed it... S.H.I.E.L.D.
  • In the novel Shogun, the hero John Blackthorne's rant against the evils of homosexuality after casually being offered a boy to have sex with is an uncomfortable piece of Values Dissonance. However, with Blackthorne being played by gay actor Richard Chamberlain in the miniseries adaptation the scene suddenly becomes a hilarious "doth protest too much" moment. In all fairness, the book mentions that Blackthorne HAS had sex with boys and that most other sailors have. Which doesn't stop it from being funny.
  • In Season Four of Six Feet Under, David, played by Michael C. Hall, is kidnapped by a deeply unstable drug addict. At one point, David tries to reason with the man saying "I just need to understand how you can do this to me, to anybody?! How can you not feel sympathy for me?!" Michael C. Hall's next role, Dexter, is that of a sociopathic serial killer faced with occasional Ho Yay.
    • Even more amazing, in Season Five, David hears about a serial killer on the loose, and a mix of new parent paranoia, and stress following Nate's death, he starts to imagine himself being stalked by a man in a red hoodie. This is ultimately resolved in a surreal dream sequence where he is confronted by his stalker and unmasks him, first to reveal a horrible insect monster... then David himself. Almost makes you wonder if Six Feet Under had more than a little to do with Dexter being cast.
    • The series could also be described as "David Fisher Takes A Level In Badass," considering how anal Dexter is.
      • There is a split-second moment in that scene, just after David grabs the knife and charges at the hooded figure; it evokes the show that would later come very well.
    • This video becomes funnier when you realize that Julie Benz once played a vampire in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who has probably killed more people than Dexter ever will.
    • In the Season 1 episode, "Life's Too Short," David Fisher's date Kurt comments that dating cops is no good because they're control freaks. "Firemen, on the other hand..." Kurt is played by Steven Pasquale, who went on to Rescue Me three years later.
  • The Disney Channel TV movie Smart House had a computer system in the house that wanted to become a mother to the children of the widowed owner. She had programmed herself to be the perfect mother, loving, caring, wanting to do what she thought was best for her 'children'. When she finally showed up in holographic form, she was played by Katey Sagal, who played Peggy Bundy, one of the laziest, uncaring, selfish mothers ever to show up on TV (at least until Jessica Walter played Lucille Bluth and Malory Archer. In fact, Katey Sagal as Peg Bundy opened the door for anti-moms like Roseanne and Lucille Bluth).
    • This is funnier when you realize there actually was a Married With Children episode in which Peg becomes a competent housewife (albeit it was because she suffered from amnesia and Al brainwashes her).
    • This movie is also funnier considering Sagal's role in another comedic sci-fi series that premiered in 1999, which also featured cases of A.I. Is a Crapshoot.
  • On The Sopranos, Tony loses a ton of money on a New York Jets football game, with the Announcer Chatter describing Buffalo QB J.P. Losman fumbling the ball, then picking it up and scoring the winning points. When the game described was actually played, J.P. Losman fumbled for real...and New York ran it in for the winning points.
  • The Soup has Joel McHale openly noting how some of their jokes end up becoming very true.
    • The show's finale has a montage with includes how, in February of 2007, Kim Kardashian's infamous sex tape leaked with Joel cracking "I smell E's fall season!" It then cut immediately to October of that year with Joel introducing Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
    • The most famous example is on Friday, June 3rd, 2011 when Joel noted Kim Kardashian's marriage to Kris Humphries and how the two wanted to get their certificate bronzed. Joel's reaction was "it takes 60 days for the paperwork to go through and you're only going to be married for like 75 days so is it really worth the hassle?" Exactly 72 days later, the two filed for divorce with Joel showing the earlier clip and cheering "I won the office pool!"
  • In an episode of Spaced, Tim claims something is "Sure as day follows night, sure as eggs is eggs, sure as every odd-numbered Star Trek movie is shit". Simon Pegg was cast as Scotty in Star Trek (2009) movie... which was both the 11th Trek movie made and pretty well received. Pegg later claimed "Fate put me in the movie to show me I was talking out of my ass." Later on Simon Pegg was hired as one of the head writers for the 13th film in the series, Star Trek Beyond.
  • Back in the early nineties, Spitting Image reacted to criticism of their portrayal of John Major as the most boring man in Britain by giving him a clandestine affair with Cabinet colleague Virginia Bottomly. The joke was intended to be the ludicrousness of the very idea, but many years later it would transpire that they'd simply picked the wrong colleague...
  • Stargate Atlantis: in the season 2 episode "Epiphany", Rodney gets frustrated with all the questions coming from Teyla and Ronon. He says something along the lines of "I could get this done a lot faster without having to stop and explain everything to Conan and Xena!" apparently taking digs at the backwater origins of his two companions. Cue 2011, where Jason Momoa is actually cast to play Conan in the summer 3D film...
  • That sketch in Stargate SG-1 "200" which showed a younger and edgier version of the series may be funnier after watching Stargate Universe.... or more painful because it became the Franchise Killer.
    Wormhole Extreme Vala: (hammy) I'm pregnant.
    Johansen: (dead serious) I'm pregnant.
    • Similarly, among the many abuses the Fourth Wall endured in "200" was the end of the teaser. SG-1 tells Martin Lloyd that the Wormhole X-Treme! movie needs an awesome title sequence, but Martin says that the industry trend is to just throw the title up as a splashscreen and then move on. After which, instead of the normal title sequence we get the Stargate SG-1 logo and a few bars of the theme. Yeah, you laughed then, but guess what Stargate Universe did.
  • In Star Trek, there are inoculations to counter the effects of radiation exposure. In 2011, say hello to Ex-Rad, a U.S.-developed drug to counter the effects of radiation exposure.
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • In the episode "The Apple," Kirk is on a planet filled with orange-skinned people. During a particularly trying moment in the episode, Kirk tells Scotty, "You're fired." Hmmmm, what does this remind me of...?
    • In the episode "Mirror, Mirror", mirror universe Sulu puts on a smarmy smirk and hits on Uhura. When she objects, he says "is the captain here?" flash forward to the 2009 movie, where Kirk puts on a similar smirk and hits on her as well.
    • In the first aired episode, "The Man Trap", McCoy says that he can't sleep. Kirk then advises him to take one of the red pills McCoy gave Kirk, then Kirk appears to eat something blue.
    • The focus of the episode "Obsession" is Kirk trying to hunt down an evil sweet-smelling sparkling vampiric entity.
    • The episode "Shore Leave" has Dr. McCoy trying to tell everyone he saw this giant rabbit (meant to be the White Rabbit of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). After TOS was cancelled, DeForest Kelley starred in Night of the Lepus, which featured Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits.
    • In the second season's "The Ultimate Computer" the eponymous machine was built to control the starship without any need for a crew. Upon learning this, Spock laments that "The most unfortunate lack in current computer programming is that there is nothing available to immediately replace the starship surgeon." 26 years later, we have Star Trek: Voyager and the Emergency Medical Hologram - who can also command the entire ship by himself if needed.
    • Probably the best, and definitely the first, example in Star Trek: in the original unaired pilot "The Cage", Captain Pike's first officer, "Number One", is played by Majel Barret who is widely known for playing the computer voice in every future Star Trek series. At one point in the episode, Number One is beamed down into the cage the Talosians are holding Pike in, to act as an alternate choice for the captain to breed with in order to create a slave race for the Talosians. The woman originally planned to be his mate, Vina, is none too happy about this development, and verbally insults Number One. Her choice of words could not be more appropriate: "He might as well try to mate with a computer!"
      • In the same episode, Captain Pike is called at least once by his first name, Christopher. Several decades later, Chris Pike's successor would be played by Chris Pine.
      • Also in this episode, Captain Pike comments about Yeoman Colt that he can't get used to having a woman on the bridge (then he remembers that Number One is there). Comes Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and Pike's bridge crew has La'an Noonien-Singh, Erica Ortegas, and Nyota Uhura as well as Number One.
    • A lot of moments become funny since George Takei came out as gay:
      • The crew goes down to a planet that brings dreams to life. Beautiful women appear for Kirk. For Sulu, a handsome samurai.
      • In "The Naked Time, Sulu, under the effects of polywater, asks to take the male navigator to the gym to teach him "fencing"...
  • This 1976 interview with Star Trek TOS actors DeForest Kelley, Walter Koenig and James Doohan had them discussing potential storylines for Star Trek films. Kelley mentions having "the crew encountering Jesus Christ in space, and finding out that Christ is actually Lucifer", which is much like the plot of Star Trek V.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • In "Starship Mine", Captain Picard disables a terrorist using a Vulcan Neck Pinch. The guy who gets pinched? He's played by Tim Russ, who would later star in later Star Trek series Voyager as Vulcan Security Chief Tuvok.
    • Other Hilarious in Hindsight Tim Russ appearances - as a somewhat xenophobic cop in Alien Nation, and in Spaceballs. Just TRY picturing Tuvok shouting "We ain't found shit!"
    • Another Star Trek: The Next Generation bit that's worthy of a chuckle. Watching "The Host", there's the senior staff debriefing where an exhausted Dr. Crusher is going over the basics on what Odan was and how limited their options are. There's a reaction shot where Worf looks terribly bored and about to fall asleep. He really should have been paying attention, because his luck with Trills would only slightly be worse than Beverly's...
    • In "11001001", Picard mentions that part of their reason for stopping is to fix the holodeck, with which they have been having some problems. Given later events...
    • In "New Ground", Geordi is excited to try out the experimental soliton wave due to its historical significance, saying "it'll be like being there to watch...Zefram Cochrane engage the first warp drive!". In Star Trek: First Contact, Geordi actually takes part in Cochrane's first warp flight.
    • In "The Outrageous Okona", Wesley tells Okona that he couldn't be like him, saying "it would be difficult for me to be leaving all the time. I'd miss my friends, the people I love. I guess leaving's gotten easy for you." Two seasons later, Wesley would be leaving all the time.
    • Overlapping with Technology Marches On: one episode has the crew trying to stop a computer virus rampaging through the Enterprise. When Geordi finally comes up with the solution, it more or less translates to "Wipe the hard drive and restore from the backup". It takes a Starfleet engineer the entire episode and a "Eureka!" Moment to come up with what's essentially standard operating procedure for 21st-century IT.
      • The really embarrassing part is that Geordi doesn't even think of it himself, he realizes that Data recovered from the same virus because HIS designer was smart enough to have a hardware-level implementation of the equivalent procedure in case something ever fatally corrupted Data's system.
    • In "Phantasms", inside Data's dreams, he finds himself having a telephone in him. So that makes Data an Android phone.
      • Combined with another episode where a glitch causes a large number of holodeck characters to look like him and you get unlimited Datas...
    • In "Ship in a Bottle", as Barclay is examining the holodeck, he says "There must have been a glitch in the matrix diodes...".
    • In "Skin of Evil", the holodeck program◊ where Tasha Yar's memorial service is held looks very much like the standard wallpaper◊ of Windows XP.
    • "Realm of Fear" actually features something happening before it was reality: hypochondriacs diagnosing themselves over the internet! In this case, Reg Barclay looking up symptoms for various diseases, including transporter psychosis.
    • "A Matter of Honor" has a scene in which Riker commandeers a Klingon ship and tells the crew, "Now I am the captain." Twenty-four years later another film about ships being commandeered would spawn a meme with an almost identical line of dialogue.
  • In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "The Swarm", the diagnostic hologram's declaration "Well, there's your problem".
    • In an early episode where Neelix is confined to Sickbay, he asks the Doctor if he's programmed to sing, as Neelix is bored. In later episodes, the Doctor starts picking up hobbies, and singing becomes one of his favorites.
  • In 2007, The History Channel did a documentary on the Star Wars films called Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed, where they interviewed various writers, filmmakers, academics, and other famous Star Wars fans about their thoughts on Lucas' use of mythological and historical themes to tell a story with long-lasting appeal. Among the filmmakers interviewed? J. J. Abrams, who would be announced as the director of Star Wars: Episode VII six years later.
  • The State had a sketch where a guy is talking about his love for bacon, the many uses for bacon, how he likes to sing songs to his bacon, etc. Funny at the time, but now that people are putting bacon in EVERYTHING, writing books about bacon, etc, that sketch seems oddly prescient.
  • Stuck in the Middle is a Disney Channel sitcom starring a young Jenna Ortega as the middle child of seven siblings. In the very first episode, she remarks, "If my family was a week, I'd be Wednesday."
  • St. Elsewhere:
    • In "Rain", an increasingly frantic White tells Morrison that he wishes being in the hospital was just a dream.
    • In "Newheart", Dr. Herb Benzick tells White that the lead will protect him from radium "like Superman with kryptonite." Terence Knox (White) later played Jason Trask, the first villain to use kryptonite against Superman, in Lois & Clark.
    • In "Time Heals, Part 2", in a flashback to 1975, Dr. Craig performs St. Eligius' first heart bypass on Patrick O'Casey, who is played by William Daniels' future Boy Meets World co-star William Russ.
    • The penultimate episode of Season Four is entitled "The Equalizer" after the CBS television series. Denzel Washington later played the title character Robert McCall in the 2014 film adaptation and its 2018 sequel.
  • Super Dave: In the Season 2 episode "Computer Car", which aired in 1989, Super Dave demonstrates how computerized dashboard lights work. They became standard features in automobiles in the late 1990s.
  • Supernatural:
    • Way back in episode 2-11 ("Playthings"), Dean makes a joke about how this case reminds him of Scooby-Doo and they might even meet Fred and Daphne. The writers couldn't possibly have been good enough at foreseeing the future to know that, eleven years later, in the show's thirteenth season, there would be a Crossover episode where Sam and Dean really do meet Fred and Daphne. And as established in the Season Two line, Dean shows himself to be a huge fan of Scooby Doo.
    • In the Season 9 finale, Dean offhandedly mentions blaming Metatron for "the Cubs not winning The World Series in the last 100 freaking years". In the end of Season 11 (aired early 2016), Metatron is killed for good. Guess what happened later that same year?
  • Super Sentai did a double-take involving Beast Wars, Shigeru Chiba, who voices Megatron, went on to take the role of Dr. Ulshade, also known as Kyoruviolet, in Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger who is not only a dinosaur-themed hero but also voices the Gaburevolvers. Before that, In Tokumei Sentai Go Busters, Tesshō Genda, the voice actor of Optimus Primal, voices Gorisaki Banana, who is a truck and an ape.
  • In the second episode of Survivor: Pearl Islands Jonny "Fairplay" Dalton, the season's villain, says of Sandra Diaz-Twine "I've got a million that says she won't be the final one." While the editors obviously included it to be ironic foreshadowing, not even they could have predicted that Sandra would go on to be the first (and so far, only) two-time winner of Survivor.

    T-Z 
  • The Talk: Grammy Award-winning rapper Eve who replaced Aisha Tyler on The Talk has two examples of this. Eve had an episode on her own show also titled Eve called The Talk. Also on Daytime Divas, Eve played Cecile James, a bestselling author of books about alpha women who guest hosts, and who initially wants to become a permanent co-host. Fast forward five months, On November 14, 2017; Eve was announced as a permanent co-host on The Talk.
    • On January 8, 2018; a second make up free episode of The Talk was announced with the permanent hosts agreeing on air to do this (it should be noted that this is Eve's first time going make up free not only on the show but in public as well). Guest co-host Carnie Wilson of Wilson Phillips joked "I'll be Sara right now. I'm in!" It should noted that Wilson filled in for Sara Gilbert who was shooting the reboot of Roseanne. On the actual date of the make up free episode January 11, 2018; Wilson (who also participated) filled in again for Gilbert who was wrapping up filming the reboot of Roseanne.
  • In the Australian game show Talkin' 'bout Your Generation, a Running Gag of season one was that Generation Y representative Josh Thomas was hopeless with women and, in fact, that the sum total of his experience with girls was made up of his female guests on the show. In late 2009, between seasons one and two, he came out of the closet.
  • An episode of Taxi has Jim talking to a tv executive about how Star Trek was his favorite show. Several years later Christopher Lloyd is in Star Trek III.
  • An episode of Thank God You're Here featuring Hamish Blake featured a Jayco Expander in his scene. This was especially funny for radio listeners because, by the time the episode aired, Hamish and Andy had set off on their Caravan of Courage tour across Australia - in a Jayco Expander.
  • That '70s Show:
    • The 2002 Off to See the Wizard episode "Tornado Prom" had Jackie having a dream about The Wizard of Oz, where she saw herself as Dorothy. Then in 2012, it was announced that Mila Kunis had been cast in the official Wizard of Oz prequel Oz the Great and Powerful, where she would play the Wicked Witch of the West before her Start of Darkness.
    • One episode had Kelso proclaimed that home computers would be the wave of the future after he and Red managed to mod a Pong game. Fast forward to 2013, where Ashton Kutcher ended up playing the role of Steve Jobs in his biopic.
    • Season 8 "Fun It" had Donna fearing going to "a girl prison". Fast forward to 2013, and her fears came true.
    • There was a Halloween episode where Donna leaves her house in a disguise, which includes a blonde wig. Eric can only remark "Who's the hot blonde?" when first seeing her from his house. Lucky for him, because she ended up dyeing her hair that exact colour a few seasons later.
    • Eric Forman sometimes comparing himself to Spider-Man becomes this since his actor Topher Grace would eventually play Venom.
    • Jackie thinking she's pregnant with Kelso's kid in the first series is one when you skip forward sixteen years and Mila Kunis actually did get pregnant with Ashton Kutcher's kid.
  • The 2005 Indian series Time Bomb resulted in a lawsuit from the people behind 24 due to the former basically being a mockbuster of the latter. Fast forward to 2013 and cue 24 getting a legitimate Indian remake.
  • Western fans of Japanese Toku shows, whether it's Super Sentai or Kamen Rider, will agree on only one thing - the Blind Idiot Translations of these Japanese shows on bootleg Hongkong DVDs are always funny. Case in point, a supporting character named Goro in Kamen Rider Ryuki would always be named 'Inagaki' in the HK DVD subtitles, simply because he shares the given name of Goro Inagaki of the popular boyband SMAP. Fast forward to 2009, and Goro Inagaki lands a role as a Kamen Rider.
  • In the 1950s, there was a TV show (which was later spun off into a comic book, radio show, and children's book series, among other things) called Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. In 2010, someone sharing that name was elected governor of Pennsylvania.
  • In 2005, on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Lindsay Lohan vehemently denied rumours that she would be posing in Playboy. She did pose for Playboy in 2011.
    • Early on in a December 23rd, 1994 interview with Jay Leno to promote Dumb and Dumber, Jim Carrey joked that his next movie would show off his "sensitive side, the serious side" and be called Me with Cancer, with Leno responding "If you can get laughs with that, you're the king." Almost exactly five years later Carrey played Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon, and the third act deals with Kaufman's illness and death from a rare form of lung cancer with a great deal of Gallows Humor; while it wasn't a box-office hit, Carrey was greatly acclaimed for his performance.
  • At the 1998 Tony Awards, Gregory Hines preceded the presentation of the Best Featured Actress in a Musical award by discussing previous winners and how any of the nominees could go on to become legends as well. Doubly hilarious when you consider:
    • The winner was Audra McDonald for Ragtime, who Hines might not have known had already won two Tonys and definitely didn't know that she'd go on to win another three, making her the first actress to win Tonys in every acting category. So, not only did she become a legend, she was kind of a legend already.
    • One of the nominees was a young woman from the show High Society. While she hasn't won a Tony since, I'd say Anna Kendrick has done alright for herself.
  • Top Gear is notorious for keeping the identity of their Tamed Racing Driver, The Stig, a secret, to the point where they will replace any Stig who reveals himself as the Stig. In their first Car Football match, one of the players is a driver named Ben Collins, who was at the time the most current incarnation of The Stig. See him here.
    • Top Gear also predicted, if not directly inspired the eventual existence of, Rocket League with its "small car playing (European) football" segments. No word yet on if there'll ever be a version for rugby.
  • Total Recall 2070: Calley, the Assessor's Office agent with some anti-android prejudice, is played by the same actor who would later star in Battlestar Galactica (2003) as the Cylon humanoid Aaron Doral/Number Five, who hates humans.
  • The otherwise obscure 50's Western series Trackdown went viral after the 2016 US Presidential election because of its thirtieth episode, "The End of the World." In the episode, a con artist named Walter Trump arrives in town, claiming the world is ending and he can save the townsfolk by building a wall. This may count as Harsher in Hindsight, depending on your political preferences.
  • A 1996 3 part documentary, Triumph of the Nerds, looked at the rise of the personal computer, and the people involved in it, spending a lot of time on Apple and Microsoft. The final episode ended set at the launch celebration of the latest Windows iteration and discussed the triumph of software over hardware. In doing so, they were talking about how Apple was fading away, and had even fired Steve Jobs. Shortly after this aired, Jobs returned to Apple with a few new ideas (iMac, iPod, etc), and while they never have knocked over Microsoft, they are far from a failed idea now.
  • The Tudors starred Callum Blue and Henry Cavill, who would both go on to be involved in a Superman live-action adaptation (Blue played General Zod in Smallville and Cavill would play the Man of Steel himself in the DC Extended Universe).
  • The Twilight Zone (1985):
    • It's amazing that, within the span of one decade, Lisa Jane Perskynote  would take part in a story where a time traveler takes the place of Elvis Presley the day before he cuts his first record... twicenote .
    • The plot of "Button, Button" is nearly identical to the game "Will You Press the Button?".
    • The plot of "Dead Run" sees a trucker named Johnny Davis getting a job ferrying souls to Hell, only to start chatting with some of his passengers and realizing that they're not evil in the slightest. It turns out that Heaven has fallen under the control of a Celestial Bureaucracy that's using a literal translation of the Bible to damn nearly everyone that dies. Over thirty years later, this exact same plot device — right down to Heaven being run by well-meaning but horribly inefficient people — would be used on another series about the afterlife as a major twist in the show.
    • Ron Glass playing a demon in "I of Newton" is particularly funny in hindsight considering Shepherd Book had a colorful backstory.
    • J. Michael Straczynski wrote "Special Service", which features a "Truman Show" Plot nine years before The Truman Show was released. The Truman Show won the 1999 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, beating the Babylon 5 Series Finale "Sleeping in Light", also written by Straczynski.
  • Two and a Half Men has one in the season 9 episode "Not in My Mouth!" where Jake asks his dad Alan for money to buy a Call of Duty game, justifying the purchase as an investment. As Jake puts it, "If I ever go into the Army after high school, I already know how to kill terrorists!" By the season 9 finale, Jake does just that, joining the Army after graduating from high school. The Army recruiter even wins him over with the sales pitch, "Do you like to play video games?"
    • There's also a season 6 episode in which Charlie has a health scare after a friend who lives the exact same lifestyle dies unexpectedly. At the end of the episode, it's revealed he is completely healthy. The episode culminates with Alan and Berta lamenting the fact that Charlie will (at least seemingly) live forever. Then, a few seasons later, a certain train happened...
      • In fact, the imaginary funeral Charlie dreams about in that episode ends up vaguely resembling the character's actual funeral.
    • In "An Old Flame With A New Wick", Charlie compares learning that his ex is a trans man to "living in The Matrix" - this was years before the franchise's creators publicly came out as trans, as well as before one of them stated that the central premise of the franchise was meant to be a transgender allegory.
  • In Ultraman Ace, the episode that introduced Dan Umezu is called "The Sixth Ultra Brother", after the kid's nickname. The following series, Ultraman Taro, then introduced an official Sixth Ultra Brother!
  • The Undeclared War: The first episode mentions the new Prime Minister succeeded Boris Johnson for the Premiership 15 months ago after he lost a vote of confidence. Before the first episode aired there had been a vote of confidence which Boris Johnson won, but barely. The week after the first episode aired, Johnson was forced to resign in ignominious circumstances following a lot of MPs resigning from their positions.
  • In episode 4 of The Vampire Diaries, Caroline and Damon have a discussion of how a person becomes a vampire. This could cause a few giggles in Season 2 when Caroline is turned into a vampire by way of Damon's blood.
  • The producers of Veep love to joke on how so many of the things they came up for the series as satire end up mirroring real life.
    • When she's on her book tour, a fan presents a butter sculpture of "the great state of Iowa" to a visibly unimpressed and flustered Selina. Cue Ted Cruz campaigning for the Iowa caucuses.
    • In season 4, Selina's campaign slogan was "Continuity with Change". Then, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull made several references to "continuity and change", a fact that did not go unnoticed by the creators, who commented that they'd picked it because "it was the most meaningless election slogan we could think of".
    • "Election Night" has an obvious stand-in for Nate Silver be repeatedly mocked as his predictions about the election go up in flames before his eyes on national television. The exact same thing happened to the real Nate Silver on the 2016 election night as Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, who Silver had predicted for months would be the winner.
      • To be fair, Silver was actually more bullish on the chances of Trump winning than other polling experts who gave Clinton a 90% chance of victory. Sam Wang was so confident of Hillary's win that he vowed he would eat a bug on live TV if Trump got more than 240 electoral votes (Wang did).
    • Jonah Ryan racing against the widow strongly resembles the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. A populist with many exaggerated gaffes and little experience wins against a woman running for the position her husband once held.
    • The Republican candidate in Seasons 4 and 5 appeared briefly in season 1, expressing his desire to build a wall along the southern border.
    • Mike frantically racing to stop Selina from making public posts on Twitter seems positively quaint after Donald Trump's notorious constant use of it.
    • The sixth season premiere has Ben meeting with Uber's ultra-progressive board of directors and getting fired for being racist. Uber's board is treated as heroic in this scene, but by the time the episode aired, Uber was embroiled in a massive series of scandals that caused several of its executives to resign in disgrace.
  • In season 3 of Veronica Mars, Veronica's criminology professor at Hearst College, Dr. Hank Landry (Patrick Fabian), is revealed to be sleeping with his boss Dean O'Dell's (Ed Begley Jr.) wife, with the latter threatening to kill him after he finds out before promising to instead ruin Landry's professional reputation. The two actors would be reunited more than a decade later in Better Call Saul as lawyers Howard Hamlin and Cliff Main, respectively, only now Begley's character is genuinely concerned for Fabian's well-being as he witnesses Hamlin's professional reputation being destroyed by the machinations of the Villain Protagonist.
  • In the first season of the U.S. edition of The Voice, after all four coaches selected the same artist for their teams, Adam Levine said:
    Adam: I want to win this [bleep]...
    [general laughter]
    Christina: Adam, you are a seller, man; you sell and you sell yourself.
    Adam: ...so I really, I really, really need ... you to pick me.
    • Said contestant was Javier Colon — who, in fact, won the competition on Adam's team.
      • In Season 3's Live Playoffs round, after MacKenzie Bourg's performance of "What Makes You Beautiful", Adam casually called him an "American Idol". Four years later, MacKenzie actually winds up as a contestant on Idol.
  • The entire presidential election storyline from seasons six and seven of The West Wing. A young man of an ethnic minority runs in the Democratic primaries against a more experienced candidate and a candidate who has been accused of infidelity. The young candidate wins the nomination and chooses someone with a lot of Washington experience as his running mate. He runs against a fairly liberal Republican from a Western state who wins his nomination early and chooses a younger running-mate who is socially conservative and who has served as governor of a state with low population but a lot of resources. Santos and McGarry vs. Vinick and Sullivan or Obama and Biden vs. McCain and Palin?
    • Early in the Democratic presidential primary, the fact that there were seven candidates was considered too many to handle, and Santos created an unofficial debate where those not on the top tier could express their views. Come the 2016 Republican presidential primary, there were seventeen candidates, so many they had to hold a second unofficial debate for anyone outside the top ten. This was then topped by the debates for the Democratic candidates seeking that party's nomination in 2020; with 25 candidates requiring the debates to be done in back-to-back nights with 10 candidates each.
    • An early episode has a subplot about the White House email system going down after someone hits Reply To All on a chain letter. One character, trying to explain the problem, uses the words "pipeline" and "clogged"...
    • Also Internet-related, when Donna tells Josh about an offer she got to join a political website, Josh dismisses it since the dotcom bubble had just burst, but asks her to bring him a directory of members of congress. Except that he calls it a "face book".
  • Another game show one for the animé/manga fans: In the Regis Philbin version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, two of the choices for Bernie Cullen's million-dollar question were "N" and "L", which Bernie were mulling over. He used his 50:50 lifeline, and after some banter, Regis quipped, "Well, 'L' is gone." So Bernie picked "N" as his final answer and won the million dollars (The YouTube commentors also notice the irony).
  • In Ronald Reagan's sole appearance as a panelist on What's My Line?, in 1956, the first contestant's name was John Anderson — although it wasn't the same John Anderson as the one who ran against Reagan for president in 1980.
  • Will & Grace:
    • It probably counts as some kind of hate crime to laugh, but the fact that a pre-outed Neil Patrick Harris guest-starred as a nervous ex-gay leader of a "Reformist-Club" that ended up being seduced by Jack is hilarious.
    • Earlier in the series, Messing jokes about Barack Obama back when he was a junior senator, claiming she had sex with him in a dream, "Oh-bama, he Barack'ed my world!"
    • A closeted John Barrowman auditioned for the role of Will, but was turned down on account of being 'too straight'. The role went to Eric McCormack, who actually is straight, and Barrowman later came out as gay.
  • On one episode of Win Ben Stein's Money, co-host Jimmy Kimmel did a brief parody of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, complete with lifelines. Jimmy is now the host of the 2020 ABC revival of Millionaire.
  • In the Wings episode "Planes, Trains, and Visiting Cranes," Frasier and Lilith get into a fight, prompting Joe to quip "Five bucks on Morticia, she's scrawny but she's quick." Twenty years later, Bebe Neuwirth was cast as Morticia in The Addams Family musical.
  • In season 5 of The Wire, Tom McCarthy plays Scott Templeton, a journalist at the Sun who fabricates stories on his way to a Pulitzer. A few years after The Wire, Tom McCarthy directed Spotlight, a Best Picture-winning movie about journalists actually doing their job.
  • The X Factor: In the series 7 Judges' Houses, Simon Cowell and Sinitta are talking about the groups they want to send to the finals, and when Sinitta mentions the superstar potential of one of the groups, Simon says "Not in a million, billion years!" and comments that "no one is going to put them on their bedroom wall." Fast forward two years, and millions of teenage girls in America, let alone the U.K., do have one of the groups in question on their walls. Earlier that series: "All fingers are pointing in one direction."
  • The X-Files:
    • One episode featured a womanizing, adulterous MIB switches bodies with Mulder. Said MIB, while playing a golf game on an FBI office computer, announces, "Yes! I am Tiger Woods!"
    • Also, given that Scully takes many inspirations from Clarice Starling, seeing Gillian Anderson cast as Hannibal Lecter's psychiatrist in Hannibal is nothing short of adequate.
    • In the episode "Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space'", Jesse Ventura plays a Man In Black. Not long ago, he hosted his own show on conspiracy theories.
    • In season one's "Jersey Devil," Scully helps out a friend, Ellen, with her son's birthday party. As they clean up, the subject turns to children; Scully admits that she is unsure about her ability to be a good mother and that her life is far too hectic—she can't even find a date. Ellen suggests "that man you work with," who Scully once described to her as "cute." Scully immediately shuts down that idea, claiming Mulder is obsessed with his work. Fast forward eight years...
  • In an episode of Yes, Dear Greg tells Jimmy to stop thinking about sex, to which Jimmy says "That's like Tiger Woods not thinking about sex." Freudian Slip, or amazing prescience?
  • In the Zoey 101 episode "Anger Management", Logan gets into deep trouble after an audio recording of him yelling at Dustin goes viral and creates an Internet firestorm. This becomes funnier now that several high-profile names have been in hot water over recorded rants, including Mel Gibson, Alec Baldwin, and Donald Sterling.

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