‘Molly of Denali’: what’s in a name?
This week, PBS Kids launches a new cartoon, “Molly of Denali” (check local listings for time and day), the first animated series to revolve around an Alaskan native lead character. A 10-year-old girl, Molly lives in a fictional Alaskan village with her family, who runs the local post office.
It’s easy to see why “Molly” was chosen — to rhyme with Denali and perhaps remind parents of “Dora the Explorer,” another rhyming title of a series created to attract and empower young viewers from groups underrepresented on children’s television.
But do Alaska natives really call their daughters Molly? Asking for a friend!
Way back in 2005, the statistics-saturated best seller “Freakonomics” offered a racial analysis of baby names and found Molly to be the “whitest” girls’ name of them all, followed closely by Amy. Both have a slightly preppy vibe. Despite that, there have been Amys galore on TV series, from “NCIS” and “Scandal” to “The Vampire Diaries.” The most recent TV Molly was on “Mike & Molly,” starring Melissa McCarthy. Perhaps that was very popular in Alaska.
It’s probably pointless to fret too much about the appropriateness of first names among TV characters.
Not only do TV and movies use names casually and randomly, they tend to popularize names in unanticipated ways. As someone who’s been a Kevin since birth, I saw the name as fairly Irish until “Home Alone” made it far more common. The 1984 comedy “Splash” changed the name Madison from a rarity to one of the top 10 names for baby girls in rather short order.
So it could be there will be a lot more baby girls named Molly in our future, particularly if “Molly of Denali” becomes a hit.
› Some milestones have anniversaries of their own. More than 20 years ago, HBO anticipated the 30th birthday of the Apollo program with the 1998 12-part miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon.” It streams beginning today on the HBO Go service, as
well as HBO Now.
Produced by Tom Hanks, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, it offered HBO subscribers a big, long, smart take on American history, complete with a lavish budget. It arrived just before “The Sopranos” announced that HBO was ready to revolutionize television dramas. A much younger Hanks introduces the series. Look for comedian Al Franken as a White House science adviser, years before his Senate career.
› The 2018 documentary “Bisbee ‘17” on “POV”
(10 p.m., PBS, TV-PG, check local listings) recalls the dark history of an Arizona mining town located just miles from the border. In 1917, as the nation plunged into World War I and patriotism and fear of foreigners and sabotage gripped the nation, 1,200 miners, labor organizers and town residents were rounded up, deported into the New Mexico desert and told never to return, under pain of death.
Contact Kevin McDonough at kevin .tvguy@gmail.com.