A few moments ago I was idly channel surfing and I stumbled on a 2005 episode of Gilmore Girls, a show for which I have always had a secret soft spot [I mention this just in case anyone still harbors the illusion that I am an intellectual.] Rory is sitting in a college lounge reading a big, thick paperback book when a male friend comes in. "What are you reading?" he asks, "Business or pleasure?" [I will not even try to identify Rory.] She holds up the book, and he reads the title: "The Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Pleasure, I assume."
I was blown away. That has to be the one and only time that Barrington Moore, Jr. has made it onto prime time TV. I am so envious. Marcuse, of course, was another matter entirely. There was even an old New Yorker cartoon referencing him, which I think confers sizable hit points.
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There was one case of a mention of Gottlob Frege on prime time TV. It was on Big Bang Theory, and the excerpt is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FitG_PLO9Rg
Turns out the producer/scriptwriter was a Harvard alumnus, but I didn't teach him. He didn't major in philosophy. But he did grad work in phiosophy at Berkeley, so I suppose John Macfarlane should get the credit.
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