Life Imitates Art / Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who:
  • Happened in the first episode of Doctor Who, An Unearthly Child, where Susan in 1963 thinks Britain is using the decimal system and when this is commented on says they haven't begun yet. In 1971 Britain would switch to decimalising its currency.
  • The 1968 serial "The Enemy of the World" has someone arrested for not predicting a natural disaster. Now read this.
• Star Trek imagined quite a few inventions that people made real, like automatic sliding doors. Some were in development or planning stages before the show aired. The guys working on the automatic doors wrote to the show asking "how do you get your doors to open and close so fast?"^note they were operated by stagehands. Dr. McCoy's diagnostic panels were also being invented; today, they're commonplace. This is still going on: e.g., Qualcomm's 2012 challenge for engineers and inventors to create a medical tricorder-like device.
• MythBusters proved a Crash Course Landing is possible, even though there was no recorded incident of it happening in Real Life, until later a passenger landed a plane after the pilot fell ill, including being talked through it over the radio.
  • Adam and Jamie also did an episode where they addressed how to escape a rapidly-submerging car; later, a woman caught in exactly that situation managed to survive and specifically cited the Mythbusters, and that episode, as the reason.
  • Adam and Jamie proved that they can raise a sunken boat by filling it with ping pong balls hosed in from above (pictured above), over 50 years after Donald Duck.
    • The capsized fully-loaded freighter Al Kuwait was successfully raised from the bottom of the Persian Gulf in 1964 using a similar method (using styrofoam balls^note 27 million of them! as opposed to hollow ping pong balls), after the failure of pontoons and floating cranes. However, the patent claim for this method of ship recovery was rejected specifically because of "prior art", i.e. the Donald Duck strip.
• The motto "To protect and serve" was originally only found on Los Angeles police cruisers, but after Hollywood started showing it on TV, other police departments started using it, so that now it is widely spread in America.
  • Not just in America; the motto of the Northern Constabulary, the police force of the Scottish Highlands, is "Dion is Cuidich", which is Gaelic for "Protect and Serve".
• There is an unusual amount of electromagnetism coming from an island near New Zealand. Some more radical theories regarding this island involve harnessing the electromagnetism to render the island invisible to the naked eye...or worse. Sounds an awful lot like Lost's island...
• In Thomas & Friends, James's train once had to be mended with a bootlace after he wrecked the brake pipe after roughly handling the coaches. A few years ago, a similar incident happened with an Intercity train and it had to be mended with sticky tape.
• House of Cards (UK) depicted what might happen in the Conservative Party when Margaret Thatcher eventually fell from power. Ten days after the first episode was broadcast, she actually did.
  • Although John Major survived as PM through one election.
  • So, in fact, did Collingridge, although the election was called immediately after he entered office, whereas Major waited eighteen months until April 1992. The result in the series - a 20-seat Conservative majority - was also pretty prescient of the 1992 election, moreso because some people assumed at the time Labour would actually win. However him finishing as PM due to a corruption scandal does resemble John Major's time after the election being dominated by a series of corruption scandals which ended up assisting his election loss.
• The University Medical Center at Princeton is set to close down, pending the completion of the new University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro. Who would have thought?
• 24:
  • The set of CTU inspired the design of a new Joint Counter-Terrorism Center in Washington, D.C.
  • The series began with the first black man to have a serious chance at the presidency and he is later elected. Several years later, Barack Obama became the first black man with a serious chance at the presidency and in 2008 was elected. Both being Democrats, and both not afraid to become involved in The War on Terror despite wanting to avoid conflict if possible (setting up a war in the Middle East and Iraq, the show's terrorists and Osama bin Laden).
• Monty Python's Flying Circus' "Election Night Special" sketch features a clownish candidate called Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lin-Bus-Stop-F'tang-F'tang-Ole-Biscuitbarrel winning in Luton. Sure enough, for the 1981 Crosby by-election, a joke candidate called John Desmond Lewis legally changed his name to exactly that. The electoral commission was obliged to print the entire name on the ballot, although the returning officer simply referred to him as "Tarquin Biscuitbarrel" when announcing the result.
• Less than a year after Better Off Ted's Veridian Dynamics had its problems with their photosensitive scanners not recognizing black people, stories came in about HP's webcams doing the same thing.
• In the 2004 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Sick", a woman is discovered purposely poisoning her granddaughter to feign sympathy/money/services from charities. This scenario happened in September 2010, though not an exact match.
  • This cropped up during the first half of the 2011 season. The episode "Missing Pieces" in which a mother claims that her car was stolen with her young son still buckled into his car seat bears more than a passing resemblance to the Sky Metalwala case. Another episode, "Personal Fouls," which revolves around a well-respected coach who uses a children's charity to molest young boys originally aired a few weeks before the Penn State molestation story broke. However, according to The Other Wiki, this one was actually based on a different sports abuse case.
• Kim Gyngell's Colin Carpenter sketches in The Comedy Company in the late '80s included an arc spanning several episodes in which Carpenter thinks up and pitches the idea of combining instant coffee and powdered milk in a single sachet. As of 2012, this product has existed for a while now, despite the way in which it was shut down on the show: somebody simply pointed out that powdered milk tastes absolutely disgusting.
• Desperate Housewives has had a few unfortunate examples:
  • In the Series Finale "Finishing The Hat" recurring character Karen McClusky passed away from cancer. Kathryn Joosten, who played her, was also a cancer sufferer and herself was claimed by it not long after the episode aired.
  • In the first season, Lynette and her husband donated $15,000 to an elite private school in exchange for admitting their twin sons. In 2019, Lynette's actress Felicity Huffman was indicted for paying $15,000 in an SAT cheating scheme to help her daughter get into an elite college.
• Breaking Bad
  • Meth being smuggled by way of hiding it in food shipments. It's not exactly fry batter, but nacho cheese is close.
  • On Aug. 16, 2012, the Tuscaloosa County, Alabama Sheriff's Office announced its new Most Wanted Fugitive as Walter Eddie White, an accused meth cook. Such a guy would normally go unnoticed in the media had it not been for his name.
  • Another real meth cook named Walter Jack White, arrested in Montana for possession and firearms charges. In contrast to the fictional Walter White's son being an uninvolved innocent, this Walter White's son was very much involved in the business, even shooting his dad in a dispute over a debt.
  • Student planning to poison someone with ricin. While the plot is nothing new, the prosecteur accuses him of getting inspiration from this very show.
  • Real-life meth cooks have begun using blue dye to make their drugs resemble the show's.
    Interviewer: Is there really any such thing as blue meth?
    Bryan Cranston: There is now.
  • Many have drawn parallels between the story of Walter White and Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the deep web marketplace Silk Road. Both are seemingly upstanding citizens who turn out to be the kingpin of a massive drug empire. Both lack any enforcers of their own, but rely on freelance hitmen to deal with their enemies (thankfully, Ross never actually killed anyone because his hitmen were scammers). Ross even underwent a very similar arc to Walt where he went from being squeamish at his first "victim" to dishing out hits like it was candy. In a chilling display of irony, Ross was a fan of this very show and was arrested exactly one day after the finale.
• An episode of The Office has Andy Bernard pranked into believing he was a relative of Michelle Obama. Turns out his actor, Ed Helms, really is (very distantly) related to her.
• The Larry Sanders Show season 3 episode "Office Romance" has Larry get involved with Darlene causing any amount of backstage trouble for the show. The actors playing Larry (Garry Shandling) and Darlene (Linda Doucett) were dating at the time, which is art imitating life. However, at the end of season 3, Shandling and Doucett split up and Shandling fired Doucett from the show. This resulted in a lawsuit from Doucett, who was paid $1M, so it became life imitating art.
  • Season 2 episode "Broadcast Nudes" dealt with Darlene being asked, and eventually agreeing to appear, in Playboy Magazine. Linda Doucett agreed, during the making of the episode, to pose in real life for the September 1993 issue with the show airing that same week as the magazine's release.
• In a Hilarious in Hindsight example, Kate Winslet guest starred on an episode of Extras, playing a fictionalized version of herself who's very blunt about the fact that she's only doing a movie about the Holocaust so that she can win an Oscar. The episode aired in 2006, two years before she actually did a movie about the Holocaust and won an Oscar.
• The Forever episode "Hitler On the Half Shell" involves a secret cache of art stolen by the Nazis, which the son who inherited them has been secretly returning to their rightful owners for years. The vault was actually filled with reproductions of various real, moderately famous works of art, including Paul Gauguin's "Still Life with Profile of Laval" which has a profile of a man who looks remarkably like the protagonist, Dr. Henry Morgan. They carefully composed a shot where Henry was looking at the painting with his head at the exact same angle as the man in the painting, the two right next to each other, to emphasize the similarity. Since Henry is immortal, the clear implication is that he may have been the friend of the artist depicted in the painting.
• In the Friends episode "The One Where Underdog Gets Away", Joey is upset when his photo is used for a poster reading "What Mario isn't telling you...V.D., you never know who might have it." In 2013, a Brooklyn woman sued Getty Images when her photo was used without her permission in an HIV campaign. Read about it here.
• The series finale of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! sees a number of cast members killed off, including Richard Dunn collapsing. Shortly after this episode, Richard Dunn suffered a fatal stroke, not only casting a dark shadow over the episode in a lot of fans' minds but creating a noticeable absence in all of Tim and Eric's future productions.
• In the Falling Skies season 2 finale "A More Perfect Union," Anne discovered she was pregnant with Tom's child - and Moon Bloodgood (Anne) became pregnant herself a few months after filming that episode.
• Nashville took that one step further - Juliette was pregnant during season 3, but the writers made this decision before Hayden Panettiere (Juliette) became pregnant for real. So unlike Moon Bloodgood, Miss Panettiere's onscreen baby bump was the genuine article (except for "I Can't Keep Away From You" and "This Just Ain't a Good Day for Leavin'," shot after she gave birth). Juliette subsequently came down with postpartum depression... and Panettiere went on medical leave from filming season 4 to deal with it in real life, sending the series into Harsher in Hindsight territory.
• The fifth season of NUMB3RS includes an episode in which a passenger train collides with a freight train in Los Angeles. In the time between when the episode was shot and when it was set to be aired, an accident occurred in which a passenger train collided with a freight train in Los Angeles. The episode's airdate was pushed back by nearly a month as a result, requiring several scenes to be omitted to maintain continuity with where it ultimately ended up in the season's chronology. When it did air, it was preceded by a disclaimer specifically cautioning viewers that the episode was similar to a recent tragedy, as well as assuring them that this was not a case of Ripped from the Headlines.
• A Harsher in Hindsight example is found in The Rockford Files 1978 two-parter "The House on Willis Avenue." The villain has people's homes and offices bugged with tiny microphones and cameras; information is sent to computers at a huge underground monitoring station to be used for blackmail. He plans to spread this operation out to the city of Los Angeles and eventually all of the U.S.
  Police Sgt. Coopersmith. It appears that Mr. MacGregor and the two men who were arrested with him were attempting to set up a secret system of computers — which would carry the personal records of some 200 million Americans.
  News Anchor. It gives one pause. It's one thing for our government to have us categorized and computerized. But why does a company install a secret underground computer center right in the middle of one of the world's largest cities? Why, indeed.
  • The episode concluded with a disclaimer:
  Secret information centers building dossiers on individuals exist today. You have no legal right to know about them or sue for damages. Our liberty may well be the price we pay for allowing this to continue unchecked.
• Police, Camera, Action!, an Edutainment Documentary had its presenter Alastair Stewart talking directly to the audience on the second episode which aired on 20 December 1994 about how he was arrested for drink-driving and stating it was not socially acceptable to do so, then on 1 July 2003, 8 years 6 months later, he actually was banned from driving until 2005.
• Ricardo Medin, Jr., who played the red ranger Cole in Power Rangers Wild Force and sword wielding villain Deker in Power Rangers Samurai, has been arrested, apparently for murdering someone with a sword!
• In 2015, a species of frog was discovered that looks just like Kermit from The Muppets.
• The Jeopardy! Intelligence Test has been since the titular show's beginning a quick, easy way to show off a character's intelligence by making him accurately answer even the most difficult questions of the titular game show. 2011 rolled in, and IBM put artificial intelligence on the show just to show off how good they were at big computing and machine learning.
• The Madam Secretary episode "Catch and Release" ends with "Jihadi Judd", an American who joined ISIS, being killed in a drone strike on orders of President Dalton. His model, British-born ISIS member Mohammed Emwazi, a.k.a. "Jihadi John", was killed in a joint US-British drone attack four days after the episode aired.
• The first season of Life in Pieces ended with several plot developments, including Matt getting engaged to his on-again, off-again girlfriend Colleen. During the off-season, Matt's actor Thomas Sadoski got engaged to his real life girlfriend Amanda Seyfried.
• One Whammy animation from the game show Press Your Luck introduced in March 1984 had a politician Whammy barking "If elected, I will raise your taxes!" A few months later at the Democratic Convention, Reagan's opponent Walter Mondale admitted he will raise taxes if elected as president, citing that Reagan would do so as well and not be honest about it. Mondale was beaten soundly on Election Day.
• One of the stranger storylines in Oz involved trialing a drug that accelerated the aging process. The idea was to save taxpayer money by depriving the convict of the time they otherwise would have had to serve. More recently there has been talk of a "time dilation" pill which would take the opposite approach to the same end - rather than physically age the subject, the pill would cause them to perceive time as passing much more slowly than it really is. This way, they could serve a decades-long sentence in their mind while spending mere hours incarcerated. The latter pill inspired an episode of Elementary.
• Given the nature of the show, the Black Mirror Twitter account likes to acknowledge cases of this.
• The official fanclub of The Prisoner (1967) dissolved in a heady mix of paranoia, backstabbing, and accusations of people spying on each other in real life. Several tertiary members mentioned this trope when they heard of what happened.
• The Brooklyn Nine-Nine episode "The Last Ride", where the precinct is about to be shut down but gets saved due to overwhelming support from social media, ended up applying to the show itself - It got canceled by FOX, but overwhelming anger from social media led to NBC picking it up for another season within twenty-four hours.
• In early May 2019, David McCallum was seen leaving Martin's Tavern in Georgetown with none other than Robert Mueller. This one is doubly hilarious given McCallum's most famous roles: 1) Illya Kuryakin, the Russian spy from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and 2) Ducky, the doctor and medical examiner on NCIS. People were quick to joke that Illya Kuryakin was in on the Mueller Investigation, or that NCIS was on the case.
• St. Elsewhere: In "Fathers and Sons", Victor Bevine, the moving man, tells Dr. Westphall, "Dad says we're on the cusp of a complete monetary disaster. The problem with the banks and corporations is they got debts up the wazoo, no way they're ever gonna pay it off. If you think '29 was a mess says Dad, wait till you see the sidewalks of Wall Street in two years tops." This episode aired on September 25, 1985. Black Monday was October 19, 1987, so he was off by less than a month.
• An episode of Seinfeld had Kramer being assigned a new phone number one digit off from Moviefone's, and he receives a deluge of calls and runs a single-person operation posing as Mr. Moviefone. In 2020, Moviefone's parent company went bankrupt, and the company was, for a time, run by a single employee.
• In an episode of Only Fools and Horses, Del Boy tried selling bottled tap water as "Peckham Spring", which was then found to be contaminated. A decade later, Coca-Cola would introduce their Dasani brand of bottled water to the UK, which was purified tap water from their plant in Sidcup, which is very close to Peckham, which the press were quick to latch onto. This too was quickly withdrawn after it was found to be contaminated, with excessive levels of carcinogenic chemicals used in the purification process.
• Years and Years: The news of Trump winning the 2020 election amid allegations of voter fraud in Florida (likely taking some basis from Bush v. Gore) can come across as this due to the fact that Trump lost the 2020 election and himself made allegations of voter fraud (though not in states he had won, such as Florida).
• Ted Lasso: One episode in Season 2 has AFC Richmond player Sam Obisanya leading the team in a protest against their main sponsor for committing environmental damage in Nigeria by covering the sponsor's logo on their jerseys. Months later, real life soccer club FC Schalke 04 removed the logo of their sponsor Gazprom from their jerseys to protest the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
• Servant of the People: In this series, Volodymyr Zelenskyy played the President of Ukraine... which he became for real in 2019.
• Holby City: Peter Wingfield, who played surgeon Dan Clifford, went on to become a doctor in real life.

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