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The TV Effect: What a Series Does to a Baby Name

Movies spike a name for a year. Television does something stranger — it climbs, season after season, and peaks at the finale. Here's what the SSA data shows.

We’ve already looked at what a Disney movie does to a baby name: a sharp spike, a reign of about eighteen months, then a long drift back down. A film is a two-hour event, and the data reads like one.

Television is a different animal, and the shape it leaves in the numbers is genuinely different. A series runs for years. You live with these characters through seasons, hiatuses, and arguments about the ending. So instead of a spike, you get a climb — a name that rises season over season and tops out right around the finale.

Then streaming arrived and broke the pattern again. Here’s the whole thing in the data.

The eight-year climb: Arya

Game of Thrones premiered in April 2011 and ended in May 2019. Watch Arya do the entire run with it:

That’s not a spike. That’s eight consecutive years of growth, ending — precisely — the year the show did. No Disney princess in our data does this; Ariel went from #209 to a #66 peak and back down inside four years. Arya took nearly a decade to get there.

The decline afterward is gentle, too. Six years past the finale it’s still at #158, more than six times its pre-show level. A movie loans a name to you. A series hands it over.

The title that became a name

The strangest thing Game of Thrones did wasn’t Arya. It was Khaleesi — which is not a name. It’s a rank, a Dothraki honorific meaning roughly “queen.” In 2011, the year the show premiered, 28 American girls were given it. By 2018 that was 565, and it still stands at 410 a year, around #690.

The character’s actual name did far less: Daenerys went from 21 girls in 2012 to a peak of 166 in 2018. Parents took the title and left the name, which is one of the odder facts in this entire dataset.

The sequel repeated the trick in miniature. House of the Dragon arrived in August 2022, and Rhaenyra went from 31 girls in 2022 to 127 in 2023, settling at 108 last year.

The slow burn that’s still burning

The best current example of the climb isn’t fantasy at all. Yellowstone premiered in June 2018, and Kayce has gone up every single year since:

26 boys in 2018 → 48 → 85 → 197 → 488 → 666 → 760 → 843 in 2025.

Kayce is #375 today, and unlike Arya it hasn’t peaked yet — 2025 is its highest year on record. A name that was effectively nonexistent eight years ago is now more common than Otis or Bruno.

Rip got a smaller version of the same treatment: 8 boys in 2017, up to 111 by 2021, now easing back to 59.

Streaming put the spike back

Here’s where it gets interesting. Wednesday dropped on Netflix in November 2022 — all eight episodes at once, watched by an enormous number of people over about a fortnight. And Wednesday behaves like a movie, not a series:

97 girls in 2022 → 154 in 2023 → 75 in 2024 → 37 in 2025.

One year up, then a collapse — to below where it started. It’s now rarer than it was in 2013. Enid, the show’s other breakout, did the same thing on a smaller scale: 28 girls, then 66, then straight back to 30.

The mechanism seems obvious once you see it. A weekly show is a habit that runs for months a year, for years. A binge-release is a weekend. The name gets one cultural moment instead of eight, and the data shape follows exactly.

Vikings — weekly, from 2013 — sits on the other side of the line: Ragnar climbed from 9 boys in 2013 to 97 in 2023 before easing to 52.

The shows that moved nothing at all

This is the part people get wrong most often, and it’s the same rule the Disney data gave us: a show mostly moves names that weren’t already in use.

Stranger Things has been one of the biggest series on television since July 2016. Its character names did essentially nothing — because they were deliberately chosen to sound like 1983, and 1983 names were already on their way down:

• Dustin — 869 boys in 2010, 554 the year the show premiered, 365 last year. It kept falling straight through the show’s entire run.
• Max — #118 in 2016, #180 now.
• Eddie and Nancy — both slightly lower than they were at premiere.

The one that did move is Robin, added in season three: 239 girls in 2016, 400 last year. Though honestly, Robin is also riding the same vintage-revival wave as a dozen other 1960s names, so I wouldn’t hand the show full credit.

And then the already-popular problem. HBO’s The Last of Us premiered in January 2023 with Ellie as its lead — but Ellie was already #33 in 2022. It ticked to #21 in 2024 and back to #24 last year. There was simply nowhere for it to go, exactly like Anna after Frozen.

The trap: correlation and a good show

Worth one caution, because it’s easy to see a rise and assign it a cause. Otis is often credited to Netflix’s Sex Education (January 2019). But Otis went 122 boys in 2010 → 325 in 2018, before the show existed. It was already a decade into a vintage revival. The series may have helped; it certainly didn’t start it.

Same caveat as always: a name going up during a show is not proof the show did it. Check what the line was doing beforehand.

Does any of this matter for your shortlist?

Only as much as you want it to. If you love Arya, the show is now fifteen years old and the name has settled into being a genuinely established choice — plenty of kids named Arya have parents who never watched an episode. That’s what happens when a name survives its source.

The useful version of this data is timing. A name mid-climb (Kayce) will be noticeably more common by the time your child starts school. A name mid-collapse (Wednesday) will read as very specifically 2023. And a name that never moved at all is just a name you like, which was always a perfectly good reason.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration data.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration data, 1880–2025.