More on the 'Up All Night' Names

Remember when I discussed the improbability of the names in "Up All Night"?

Well, I'm not the only one scratching their head. The Name Candy celebrity-names blog did a whole post on the topic.

Here's an excerpt:

Amy is the daughter of Reagan (Applegate) and Chris (Arnett). Ava (Rudolf) is Reagan’s talk show host boss. Seems a little backwards, right? The writers of the show definitely knew how to pick popular names, but — and this could be purely intentional — they seem to have the decades mixed up. 

Amy, at number 135, is by no means an uncommon name, but if Amy’s mom was born around 1975, she’d have given her daughter a name that held the Number 2 ranking for five years around the time she was born. Reagan probably knows a handful of Amys; At its peak, Amy was the name given to 0.8% of children. For reference, that’s double the amount of Avas born in 2010. 

To be fair, Reagan knows what it’s like to have an unconventional name and probably did not want that for her kid. Though today Reagan ranks a few places above Amy at number 127, it was pretty near obscure in the mid '70s, drifting in and out of the top 1000 until falling out completely from 1981 to 1992, during the years surrounding Ronald Reagan’s 1981 to 1989 presidency. Safe to say, Reagan probably got a bit of teasing in school. 

Ava is a particularly curious choice for a larger than life, Oprah-meets-Ellen, mid-thirties woman. It’s understandable that the writers chose an Oprah sound-alike, but why a name so closely associated with children under ten? In the '70s, Ava was a bit more popular than Reagan, but not by much, drifting in and out of the top 1000. But since 2006, it’s been the top five every year.

Thanks for some validation, Name Candy blog!