It’s like something out of a movie— (#SFWApro)

Brooklyn Dodgers
Ever see the show Leverage? One of the world’s top insurance investigators and a handful of top crooks (burglar/enforcer/hacker/grifter) work together to take down criminals the law can’t catch. One of the show’s shticks was that the hacker, being a gigantic nerd, would give them cover names such as “Emma Peel and John Steed.”
A number of people asked John Rogers, the show-runner for the series, how come nobody ever caught on (though one person did in one episode). His response: what seems obvious to Internet geeks (holding that anyone who bothers to visit his blog is presumably some degree of geeky) isn’t common knowledge to the rest of the world.
It’s a good point to remember. Not everyone has the same pop culture references. And not every fictional character should, either. One of the problems I had with Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was that while I can buy Oscar’s constant geek references, I didn’t believe in the narrator tossing LOTR references out all the time. Likewise, I have some trouble with Harry Dresden squeezing in as many geek references as he does since he never seems to read comics, just make references. And I really, really don’t believe he’d know the Evil Overlord List—that’s the kind of thing I think of as only serious Internet geeks (including, obviously, myself) knowing about (maybe I’m wrong and it’s on everyone’s lips, but I don’t think so).
A lot of people in contrast use mainstream TV or sports (for example) as metaphors and references, but I rarely run into that, even in contemporary fantasy. Not that having characters who read fantasy or watch SF movies is implausible, and sometimes it works great (the Middleman TV show, for instance), but other times it feels like all the characters share a very narrow range of taste (the similar problem in future SF is having everyone fixated on the past)
The flip side is when a character announces he sees everything in, say, terms of movies, but his observations don’t live up to that. The protagonist of Le Divorce opens by saying she’s a film student who sees everything as a movie, but that’s never brought up again (at least not before I gave up on the book midway through). Likewise Trent in Dying Is My Business comments that much of what he knows of life comes from watching old movies, but it never feels that way (as someone who really does see a lot of stuff in comic-book terms [case in point] I use myself as a measure, rightly or wrongly).
In working on Southern Discomfort, I’m trying to get away from that. Of course, it’s 1973, so speculative fiction isn’t anywhere near as mainstream as I think it is now. Lord of the Rings gets mentioned quite a bit, but that silly TV show Star Trek? Not so much. Many more characters have seen the Beverly Hillbillies (after all at the time The Beverly Hillbillies was way more popular). And yes, some sports references, though they don’t come naturally to me.
One thing I have to keep in mind is that even though the show is set in 1973, the characters’ lives go back much further. My protagonist Maria was born in 1946, the beginning of the baby boom. She grew up with Milton Berle and I Love Lucy on TV, discovered Dr. Kildare and the Twilight Zone in her teens. Joan Kirby is 18, so her childhood TV is more Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Maria crushed on Sinatra, Joan went for the Beatles (despite her father grumbling their hair was too outrageously long).
How much of that will make it into the story, I don’t know yet. But it’s good to keep in mind.