Prime Video's 5-Season Action Series Deserves Kudos For Predicting Real-Life Events

Published Oct 23, 2026, 11:45 PM EDT Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020. While Prime Video has got plenty of iconic shows in the streaming service’s roster, one of its biggest hits deserves special credit for seemingly predicting the future multiple times. Although people have repeatedly claimed that The Simpsons can predict the future, the sheer longevity of the iconic animated sitcom goes some way to explaining this apparent tendency for unlikely divination. As of The Simpsons season 38, the series is the longest-running sitcom in American TV history, with over 800 episodes to its name. Predicting that Donald Trump would become the President of the United States 15 years early was astounding, but some of the show’s other, looser future predictions can mostly be attributed to its sheer amount of output, combined with the fact that The Simpsons satirizes real-life events and history tends to repeat itself. In contrast, one Prime Video action franchise displayed an even more striking, consistent, and remarkably specific ability to predict real-life events before they occurred. What made this so strange was the fact that, although the show based some of its characters on real-life figures, it was an outlandish, far fetched superhero series. The show was Prime Video’s former flagship title The Boys, and its future predictions were the stuff of pop culture legend. The Boys Deservedly Gained A Reputation For Predicting The Future Image via MovieStillsDB Loosely based on comic book writer Garth Ennis’s infamously gruesome and tasteless superhero satire of the same name, The Boys altered many details of the original comics but kept a lot of their most shocking and risqué moments. Compared to Prime Video’s later Spider-Noir or even the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s R-rated series Daredevil: Born Again, The Boys was a uniquely obscene and daring satire that treated its “Supes” as if they were celebrity elites with superhuman abilities. In the world of The Boys, superpowers offered Supes a level of legal and social invulnerability that turned characters like Homelander into fascist monsters. This was why the titular vigilante group was formed to secretly police Supes, but the depiction of Supes as power-hungry elites also offered the show many opportunities for political satire that ended up proving shockingly prescient. In one particularly infamous instance, the villainous fascist political leader Homelander declares himself to be a god in a storyline that ended up airing only a day after current US President Donald Trump shared an AI-generated image depicting himself as Jesus Christ. While South Park’s attacks on Trump specifically called out the politician by name, Homelander’s delusional and dangerous claim eerily mirrored the real-life post. The Boys' Real-World Parallels Made Its Story Even More Disturbing This wasn’t the lone instance of The Boys reflecting real life back at itself through a proverbial fun house mirror, either. One season 5 episode saw Homelander’s PR advisor and lackey Ashley complain that she almost forced the government to pull the broadcasting licenses of every channel that wasn’t part of her boss’s propaganda network. Mere days later, the Trump administration’s FCC did just that, ordering a review of the broadcasting licenses of eight Disney-owned TV stations. The review was linked to Jimmy Kimmel’s jokes about Trump on one of these channels, proving that Ashley’s seemingly outlandish, blatantly fascist attempts at government-mandated censorship were entirely realistic. Although Prime Video’s Reacher has replaced The Boys as the streaming service’s biggest action show, it is hard to see how the series will ever outdo this frankly uncanny level of future prediction. More broadly, The Boys season 2 introduced the character Stormfront, a brash, comically abrasive superhero who was eventually revealed to be an ardent neo-Nazi beneath her semi-ironic public veneer. Stormfront’s online popularity allowed her to radicalize a huge fan base toward her right-wing reactionary views, another The Boys storyline that has since been repeated by real-life social media figures in the years since season 2 first aired.