Here’s Why the ‘Simpsons’ Showrunner Worried That the Show Might Predict Its Own Demise This Season

Every Twitter user who is vaguely aware of The Simpsons knows that the show is, supposedly, a soothsaying sitcom that’s predicted every major world event since 1989, but The Simpsons vision of the future may still yet hold the worst disaster of all — the death of The Simpsons.

Showrunner Matt Selman has long pushed back against bogus claims that there are secret portents of specific future disasters hidden in the 677 episodes of The Simpsons. Still, when the show’s 36th season kicked off with a massively meta commentary on the cultural conversation about the current state of the series back on September 29th, Selman worried that a single slip-up could seal the show’s fate forever. In “Bart’s Birthday,” every A-list celebrity who has ever appeared in a Simpsons episode showed up to a red-carpet event billed as the Simpsons series finale, with master-of-ceremonies Conan O’Brien guiding the crowd (and the viewers at home) through a hackneyed, sentimental and wholly unsuccessful attempt to tie up every single Simpsons plot line at once that satirized the dumbest social media narratives surrounding the show, including its many thousands of “predictions.”

In a PEOPLE article somewhat ironically titled “The Simpsons Showrunner Breaks Down the Method to the Animated Series Continually Predicting Future Events,” Selman once again downplayed his show’s ability to see the future through satire, chalking up with “predictive” qualities to filling the writers’ room with history buffs who understand the pattern of human stupidity throughout time. 

However, Selman did admit that, if social media caught wind of the finale fake-out ahead of time, “Bart’s Birthday” could very well have set off a chain of events where dumber Simpsons fans took the premise seriously and derailed Season 36 so badly that Fox would end up canceling the show. 

In the interview with PEOPLE, Selman called the idea to start Season 36 with a fake Simpsons finale a “bold premise,” claiming it “really worked beautifully.” Selman repeatedly insisted that, despite its billing, “Bart’s Birthday” is “not a finale, just a playful experiment with silliness.”

That, of course, is an important distinction for a show that’s been on the air for nearly 35 years. Though arguably the majority of self-professed Simpsons fans don’t stop to watch every episode of the new seasons as they repeat their favorite quotes from the Golden Age back and forth on Twitter forever, the surprise end of The Simpsons would certainly be a cataclysmic event for Western culture on par with any of the other disasters the show has supposedly foretold. 

As such, Selman made sure the Simpsons team stayed tight-lipped in the lead-up to the star-studded season premiere, telling PEOPLE, “My worry is if we let anyone know this idea before it aired, the internet would get confused and it would say The Simpsons is actually ending. And then, somehow that would manifest. We would’ve predicted our famous predictions — we would've predicted our own demise.”

“The Simpsons did it first” isn’t exactly a new phenomenon in pop culture. In fact, other perennial animated comedies have poked fun at the fact that The Simpsons seems to be ahead of the rest of the zeitgeist by months, years or even decades as was the case in the classic South Park episode “Simpsons Did It.” However, in the nearly eight years since Donald Trump first became president of the United States, an event that a throwaway line in the Simpsons episode “Bart to the Future” foretold back in 2000, Simpsons “predictions” have become their own genre of brainless clickbait as attention-hungry Twitter users capitalize on every highly publicized tragedy by posting an A.I.-generated image showing the Baltimore bridge collapse in the Simpsons art style.

But, in this case, Selman feared that The Simpsons predicting itself could become a very real ouroboros of doom that didn’t need a thousand hashtags and a sensationalized caption to go viral. Thankfully, Simpsons fans understood that “Bart’s Birthday” was a fake finale better than they can spot a fabricated Simpsons screenshot showing Marge and Lisa calling the cops on a Diddy freak-off party.