When researching TV shows, their history and their oddities, I relied heavily on IMDb’s trivia sections, which are shaped by user feedback. If “276 of 280 users found this trivia helpful,” it was worth considering!
Many lead actors on TV series have the same name as their characters, including Ray Romano/Ray Barone, Charlie Sheen/Charlie Harper, Tim Allen/Tim Taylor, Mary Tyler Moore/Mary Richards, and Roseanne Barr/Roseanne Conner. At least two actors had the same first and last name as their characters on their self-titled shows. Jerry Seinfeld played a barely fictionalized version of himself, while Drew Carey played “who he would have been had he not become an actor.”
But I also tried to study the more fundamental question: what makes trivia interesting? According to Jiawei Han, Jian Pei et al., a pattern is interesting if it is: “(1) easily understood by humans, (2) valid on new or test data with some degree of certainty, (3) potentially useful, and (4) novel.”
Potential usefulness isn’t a label that goes well with trivia, since trivia is defined as information that feels useless to people’s day-to-day lives. Sometimes it turns out not to be useless, especially if you’re a TV producer. But to register as a relaxing, fun read, a piece of trivia must feel unimportant to you personally, at first glance.
Sitcom portrayals of marraige stayed prudish for much of TV history. Dick van Dyke tried and failed to get his character to share a single bed with his wife—most TV shows of the time showed husband and wife in separate beds. One exception to that rule was Bewitched. Many years later, WandaVision nodded to this fact, showing a scene where a husband and his witch wife start out having separate beds and then magically join them into one queen-size bed. Van Dyke, then in his nineties, was a consultant on the show.
The other three variables are more useful. Consider “easy understandability.” Eyes glaze over fast when trivia requires knowledge the reader doesn’t have. And some knowledge just goes out of style. When’s the last time you saw anyone make a Latin pun?
Peter Dinklage got an Emmy nomination for every single season of Game of Thrones.
The above fact, for instance, relies on some familiarity with awards shows and how frequently they give out multiple nominations. If you don’t have that, you might look at it and go “Huh, I assume that’s unusual.” But without more context, it wouldn’t resonate like the marriage-bed story, even though that story begins decades ago.
Then there’s “novelty.” You can say that we watch fewer sitcoms than we used to and that reality shows took off in the 2000s, but that’s too widely known to arouse much discussion, unless you have some twist to add.
On the other hand, trivia can acquire novelty if what was once widely known passes out of general knowledge. Back when The Flintstones first aired, many viewers understood it as a parody of The Honeymooners. To a newer student of TV history, that connection might be a fascinating find.
Finally, there’s likely validity. Some facts are totally, verifiably true. Others, we’re pretty sure about. Sure enough, anyway.
The importance of fact-checking trivia has only grown in recent years, thanks to the rise of websites that copy off each other or use made-up bullshit in place of facts, and more recently, artificial intelligence that can use questionable sources or put good sources together wrong.
Those three “interestingness metrics”—likely validity, novelty, and understandability—are useful to writing in general, not just trivia. If only they were so easy to quantify! What’s novel and understandable to you might not be so to me, and vice versa. And if truth could be rendered as a simple metric, obvious to all, then rooting out lies and bullshit would be a lot easier than it is. Wouldn’t that be great?
The results you get on Google reflect the best attempts of smart people to put the interesting stuff at the top. I can’t say they’re always successful where I’m concerned. (The fact that they’re also trying to put stuff people can sell up top is a complicating factor, too.)
So in the absence of a better system…again, I found myself taking the wisdom-of-crowds approach with IMDb and other such sources. Sometimes you have to accept that the hoped-for, smarter future just isn’t here yet.
From iDMb trivia for the 1952 film CASQUE D'OR:
Singer Eunice Waymon was so taken with Simone Signoret's performance in this film that she adopted her name for her stage persona - Nina Simone.
"When’s the last time you saw anyone make a Latin pun?"
Brandon Sanderson's new book "The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England" includes (spoiler alert) the horrifying "Carp Diem".