Everything they need to know about Venezuela they learned from ‘Jack Ryan’

The clip features John Krasinski as CIA analyst Jack Ryan asking a packed lecture hall: ‘What would you assume is the most major threat on the world stage?’ Audience members answered China, Russia and North Korea until Ryan explained it’s Venezuela, thanks to its oil and mineral-rich land and corrupt strongman leader who tanked the economy.

That scene has gone viral and prompted many to ask whether its creators predicted the future six years before American troops captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and brought him to the U.S. to face federal drug trafficking charges. One Instagram reel of the clip got 40 million views in two days and has fueled a resurgence of interest in the Prime Video series, which ended after season four in 2023. More than a week after the news, “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan" remains in the top 10 most watched shows on the Amazon.com streaming service.

For Toha, it was a succinct entrypoint on the complex subject for her teenage daughter.

“The ‘Jack Ryan’ clip doesn’t just help give the event more color, it also brings nuances, in a matter of minutes, that would’ve been hard for kids to understand," said Colorado mom Toha. “The reaction from my kids after watching the video was priceless. It was like seeing a lightbulb moment reveal itself on their faces."

The episode isn’t exactly an answer key to a current-events quiz. Professor Ryan got a few things wrong.

For one, Venezuela doesn’t have “next-gen nuclear missiles" on its soil, as the character suggests. The country has significant gold deposits, but there are no reliable data showing that it has “more than all the mines in Africa combined." And the idea that Venezuela represents a greater threat than Russia, China or North Korea would be unconventional in mainstream geopolitical analysis.

Those details may be lost on the internet.

Ashleigh Ewald’s social media was flooded with the clip after news of Maduro’s arrest, prompting her to rewatch the episode from season two. When she originally watched it in 2019 she thought it was interesting. It took on a new level of significance this past week.

“It felt uncanny," said Ewald, a 23-year-old public policy graduate student at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. “It felt like art resurfacing to help people make sense of the moment."

Matt Keenan frequently watched “Jack Ryan" with his father when it first streamed. So when the two spoke after learning Maduro had been captured, they both made the same connection. Keenan, 24, re-watched parts of season two to brush up on the region’s geopolitics.

“What caught my attention was how the show laid out Venezuela’s strategic importance—the oil reserves, the proximity to the U.S., the geopolitical implications—and now those exact talking points are part of the real-world conversation about why this operation happened," said Keenan, of Red Bank, N.J.

Carlton Cuse, a showrunner on season two, told Deadline that the writers and researchers they worked with infused the season with “plausibility" to make it compelling.

“When you ground a story in real geopolitical dynamics, reality has a way of making it rhyme," Cuse said after the Venezuela news broke.

That realism gives viewers something they can easily immerse themselves in, said Daniel Green, director of the master of entertainment industry management graduate program at Carnegie Mellon University.

Green, who has worked on production for a number series including “E.R." and “The West Wing," points to the expert advisers who writers collaborate with to infuse shows with reality. Bill Clinton’s former press secretary Dee Dee Myers was a writer and adviser to “The West Wing" and several emergency room doctors serve as consultants on “The Pitt," he said.

“Jack Ryan," which was filmed in Colombia, employed former CIA operatives to advise on everything from proper procedure like the cellphone ban inside CIA headquarters to the realities of an analyst’s job.

Still, screens do have a history of predicting the future. A 2000 episode of “The Simpsons" featured Lisa inheriting a budget crisis from former President Trump. The 2011 movie “Contagion," about a virus that transfers from animals to humans and causes a worldwide outbreak, sounds a lot like the Covid pandemic. The pilot episode of “The X-Files" spinoff “The Lone Gunmen," featured a pilot who hijacks an airplane and flies it into the World Trade Center six months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Those examples have Carnegie Mellon’s Green musing: “Maybe there’s someone writing something now about the U.S. buying Greenland."