10 TV Shows That Cleverly Foreshadow What Happens
5. Community - Three Year Setup
There's foreshadowing things to come, and then there's Community and that show's writers just having fun with their fans. This one is technically foreshadowing of a sort, but more than anything, it's a joke with a really long payoff; specifically, this joke had a three-year payoff, which is impressive, to say the least.
In the first season, Annie utters the name Beetlejuice once in the episode "Communication Studies." In season two, she says the name once more in an episode titled "Cooperative Calligraphy." When season three rolled around—three years later, mind you—she says it a third time in the episode "Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps."
When she utters the name Beetlejuice for the third, and fateful time, a guy dressed as Beetlejuice can be seen casually walking by in the background. This was a subtle, blink, and you'll miss it sort of moment, and anyone who hadn't taken notice of the first two times may have thought it was an easy gag to have Beetlejuice show up in the scene.
It wasn't that at all; the writers crafted the scene long before it happened in the third season, and it was just to make any eagle-eyed fans who had seen the movie Beetlejuice chuckle a bit.