The Simpsons is a frequent subject of these kinds of things, to which I always answer that the show has had over 700 episodes over 33 years (holy heck Bart Simpson has been in 4th grade since I was in 1st grade?) and has had at least one "anthology" episode a year (the Treehouse of Horror does several mini-episodes). They've done a lot of situations and they always escalate the stakes for absurd effect so Springfield is frequently the epicenter of national or global crises. There's going to be parallels just by chance.
But there *is* more than chance involved. Certain kinds of crisis are going to follow certain patterns - the specifics might be completely unpredictable, but the broad strokes of events are more predictable and people in the know have written articles about how it's likely to play out, either in general or hypothetical specifics. Writers do research, and those are the kind of things they will read when outlining their own plots. COVID-19 followed a rough pattern that had been researched on various respiratory epi- and pandemics back to the 19th Century, the US invasion of Iraq was the culmination of a decade of US political developments, local toxic waste and nuclear accidents have all too often followed the same pattern. These are all things that writers will look up and read, and it informs their products. Then, as patterns are wont to do, being patterns after all, they repeat themselves again.