In the 2010s and '20s, 30 Rock has, much like The Simpsons, gained a reputation
as a show that "predicted the future," specifically that of the television industry in its increasingly crass quest for ratings like a Work Com version of Network.
- In "Cooter," which aired in 2008, Jack says "We have a chance to make this country great again." Made even more hilarious after Alec Baldwin's much-praised Trump impersonations in Saturday Night Live during the election season.
- In "The Collection", Jack learns he might be up for a promotion to CEO of GE and thus hires a detective to uncover anything potentially embarassing before GE does the same. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump forbade his staff from researching his past (despite it being standard among candidates for higher office) which led to the uncovering of several scandals that heavily impacted Trump's popularity.
- Season 3's "The Bubble" had Liz imitating Jack's voice before changing it into Batman's voice. In Season 6's "The Tuxedo Begins" (a parody of The Dark Knight Trilogy), Jack gets mugged and decides to clean up New York while Liz urges Jack to embrace anarchy.
- Speaking of "The Tuxedo Begins", its premise (Jack as a Batman-esque hero and planning to run for New York City Mayor after being mugged on his way to work, while Liz becomes frustrated by increasing disorderly behaviour on the subway and decides to pretend to be a mentally ill elderly woman to scare people away, which ends up looking increasingly Joker-esque) is made even more hilarious in light of Joker. Not only is the catalyst for the Joker turning into, well, the Joker an incident on the subway just like Liz does with her character, but Jack's actor Alec Baldwin was considered for a role in the film as Thomas Wayne... who in the film runs for Gotham City Mayor.
- Tracy starring in a North Korean propaganda film and referring to Kim Jong-il as "my boy K.J." is much funnier after Dennis Rodman visited North Korea and called Kim Jong-un an "awesome guy."
- If you're a fan of animated movies, then the line "I've got my hammer" coming out of Kenneth's mouth in a later episode should elicit at least a big smile.
- The mouth-marbling title of the Show Within a Show The Rural Juror sounds like something no one (sane) would let pass, but a few years later, the original title for CBS's Unforgettable was The Rememberer, which underwent a switch after it elicited the same reaction in real life about how unwieldy the title was.
- In early episodes, Jack Donaghy's Big, Screwed-Up Family is treated as a Running Gag. Shortly thereafter in real life, NBA ref Tim Donaghy (pronounced the same) was caught and prosecuted for fixing games and gambling on them. Jack even lampshades this in a later episode.
- Tracy attempting to play Thomas Jefferson in a biopic. Hamilton has Jefferson (and several other founding fathers) played by people of colour.
- In The Rural Juror, Tracy endorses the "Tracy Jordan Meat Machine", which burns three different types of meat together to replace bread in sandwiches. In 2009, the KFC Double Down (in which two pieces of fried chicken replace the bread roll) was created.
- For a show with so many Star Wars references in its script, it seems only fitting that one of its writers, Donald Glover, would go on to to play a starring role in one of the franchise's films.
- After Jack is asked why NBC has so few positive black characters, he tries to recommend watching Anthony Anderson on Law & Order before Jonathan hastily tells him it's been cancelled. A few years later, Anthony Anderson would take the lead in black•ish, a show which routinely addresses issues relevant African-Americans. Except it's not on NBC, but on ABC.
- Jack also says that cancelling Law And Order was a mistake. It seems NBC agreed, and the show was revived in 2022, with Anthony Anderson reprising his role from that show in season 21.
- Tracy wants to become the first black male EGOT. He lost his chance when John Legend became one in 2018. It's especially appropriate that Tracy's initial research pointed out that composers are very common EGOT-ers, accurately predicting Legend's path to the achievement.
- Considering all the crap he went through in the show, you'd probably want to give Pete Hornberger a hug. Then in 2013, he voiced an inflatable health-care robot who everybody likes to hug.
- Jack's despair at General Electric selling NBC to the Bland-Name Product version of Comcast, "Kabletown," in 2010, became much funnier in the following years, when Comcast got to be worth much more than General Electric.
- Jack and Liz being Platonic Life-Partners (with showrunner and Liz's actor Tina Fey explicitly stating that they would never hook up) can become hilarious after Jack's actor Alec Baldwin admitted in his autobiography that he became smitten with Fey in real life after he first saw her, to the point of considering asking her out (and was sorely disappointed upon being told that she was already married).
- In "Reunion," Tracy complains to a crowded elevator "How come there ain't no Puerto Ricans on Star Trek? They got every race and life-form in the galaxy, except for Puerto Ricans!" As of 2017, Star Trek: Discovery features Wilson Cruz, of Afro-Puerto Rican ancestry, in a main role.
- "The Beginning of the End":
- One of Jack's intentionally terrible TV ideas is a Nelson Mandela biopic where he's played by Joe Rogan. Funny enough when he was mainly known as the host of Fear Factor, hilarious when his podcast turned him into a controversy magnet by the end of the 2010s.
- One of the shows Jack greenlights is God Cop, a supernatural police procedural in which God helps the cops solve crimes. Replace God with the Devil and you have the premise of Fox's TV adaptation of Mike Carey's Lucifer.
- 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.
- SeinfeldVision essentially predicted the deepfake more than decade before it became a big thing.
- The Troubled Production of Jenna Maroney's Janis Joplin biopic foreshadowed similar difficulties with a real-life Joplin biopic that was to star Amy Adams.
- The season 7 episode "Game Over" has Tracy working on a biopic of Harriet Tubman starring Octavia Spencer, which endures a Troubled Production thanks to Spencer's diva antics and ultimately falls apart. Spencer's co-star in The Help, Viola Davis, was attached to play Tubman in a biopic for HBO, only for it to fall apart. (It ultimately came out in 2019 as Harriet, with Cynthia Erivo in the title role.)
- In season 1, Devon predicted that there would be a social media platform built around ten-second sitcoms. Vine did him one better and shortened it to six seconds.
- In the season 7 episode "Stride of Pride", Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte is portrayed as a "sex idiot" and a Dumb Jock. Four years later, the world got to see just what an idiot he was when he and three other members of the US men's swim team during the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics got themselves arrested after vandalizing a gas station and then trying to claim they were robbed. Two years later, Lochte got a 14-month suspension from competition for doping, the decision likely influenced by the picture he posted to Instagram of him receiving an infusion of what he claimed were "vitamins".
- James Franco, while carrying on a fake relationship with Jenna, claims that he starred in a movie that will never be released because his performance was deemed "too provocative for America." Franco would later co-star in The Interview, which was almost never released in the US (and ultimately went Direct to Video after a very limited theatrical run) due to complaints from the North Korean government that escalated to terrorist threats and a (possible) cyberattack.
- When Jack, in search of a celebrity at his network willing to endorse John McCain for President, convinces Tracy to do so, Tracy's campaign ad is a torrent of crazed rambling that includes a plan to... build a 200-foot wall along the US/Mexico border. If only he said that he'd make Mexico pay for it.
- Jack comes up with the concept of "Porn for Women", a TV recording of a handsome man who asks you how your day went and says supportive things. Now with the advent of AI chatbots this is becoming more and more reality.
- In Season 5 Episode 15 "It's Never Too Late For Now", a subplot involves Liz Lemon joining a bookclub for spinsters and their pick is Murder on the Orient Express, which comes back in the final part of the episode where Liz parodies Hercule Poirot (including the accent) when accusing her colleagues of crafting the perfect one night stand for her — even going step by step figuring out the scheme. In 2023, Tina Fey played Agatha Christie's recurring character Ariadne Oliver in Kenneth Brannagh's adaptation of the Hercule Poirot novel Hallowe'en Party retitled A Haunting in Venice.
