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I recently spent some time researching Russian names -- thanks to the Internet, I was limited by my own memory, knowledge and imagination, or hobbled by the tendency of the memory to go blank just when most needed.
In 1980's Hollywood, writers were pretty much stuck with what they'd encountered -- so their mental lists of available names could be pretty short and highly redundant.
More than that: especially in series TV, character names are likely to be shortcuts. Got a Russian character? Give him a name that will immediately tag him as Russian in the minds of as many prospective audience members as possible. Don't worry about whether you end up with all Russians having one of only two or three names. Same with any other ethnicity.
I suspect that the preponderance of Yuris at that time was largely due to Yuri Gagarin. It's not actually all that common as Russian boy's names go. Such names as Alexi, Danil, Nikita and Sasha are more common, but they don't have the same immediate response for most people in the US; and the average TV viewer will expect the last two names to be girl's names!
Other common names that do show up frequently in the Western consciousness are Ivan, Mikhail, Vladimir, Andrei, and Dmitri -- which is a first name. The surname form turns out to be "Dmitriyev". Unless it was supposed to have been his patronymic, which would have been Dmitrievitch, which is kind of tough to pronounce.
That's another usage that tends not to show up much amongst Generic Russian Characters As Portrayed in Western TV -- the patronymic is in pretty common usage in Russia as part of the given name, but this practice rarely shows up in Western-written scripts.
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