The Chris Moeller Archives

Person to Person

I conducted a little cultural survey at work today, but I didn’t mean to. Not really. The department I joined nearly a year ago participates in the national celebration of “Name Yourself Day.” Have you heard of it? I hadn’t. But there it is anyway on the internet. And the post office was still open.

It’s one of those annual "fun" days designed to promote a certain industry or make cubicle work less tedious-- along the lines of National Heimlich Maneuver Day or National Say Something Nice Day (both June 1st, incidentally). It's supposed to be on April 9th, but that falls on a Saturday in 2016 so here we are. My name choice was one I feared would be much too obvious for the day's outline, perhaps even aped by one of my other seventy-some colleagues. But my goodness, that calculation was entirely off. It took until almost three o’clock in the afternoon before I found somebody that recognized the reference I was making, and even then, these two ladies both told me it only “sounds familiar” until I filled in the missing information. The name I chose was “Dick Whitman.”

So it’s your turn. Do you know it? It's the disguised real name of the central character on AMC's Mad Men, Emmy’s Outstanding Drama Series for four straight years from 2008 to 2011, and a TV series that ended less than a year ago to some substantial fanfare. It’s been called by some, in fact, the greatest television series of all-time. You wouldn’t know it, though, to work with the group I work with. Knowing me, it won’t surprise you to hear that most of the guesses I had directed back at me today were along the lines of: "So is he a baseball player?” Jeesh. I’m glad I didn’t go with my second name choice-- Bob Benson. Google it.

The research here is completely anecdotal, but I think it’s another morsel of evidence of the epic divide today between what’s considered culturally-significant by professional critics and writers, and what is truly popular with mass audiences. I’m certain that Dick Whitman was even a cross-over reference on 30 Rock, but then that’s another multiple-Emmy-winning show that nobody watched. For all its accolades, Mad Men's highest-ever audience for a single episode was 3.54 million people ("A Little Kiss" in 2012). Meanwhile, the CBS police procedural drama CSI: Retirement City: Navy Forensic Criminals of Interest, averages more than 15 million, I think.

TV was not like this in the 1980s. The internet and the avalanche of digital entertainment options had not yet fragmented audiences for the remainder of time. Critical darlings then dotted Nielsen's Top Ten. There was also a lesser aesthetic divide in musical tastes. I don't know where I'm going with this, and I don't know why I was so frequently rankled today as I went nearly entirely unidentified. (Don Draper dreamed of this sort of anonymity.) Several other Name Yourself participants also employed obscure references, but do they really expect us to know Dune characters, or video game avatars. This is Mad Men, Emmy's favorite for nearly a decade. It's in the friggin' zeitgeist. And I didn't just pick a character's name from a TV show I liked. I picked a fictional name that symbolizes the concepts of assumed identity, ambiguity, alter ego, even rebirth and reinvention. Name Yourself Day wasn't a competition, but I should have won!

posted by CM @ 9:13 PM