Poor old Hogan is merely an innocent bystander in the modern Americanism “like Hogan’s goat”.
Just as with “Hogan’s brickyard,” a slang designation of a baseball diamond, the goat could be the property of Jones, Smith, or Rockefeller, or VanTassel.
That is, the name of the owner has no bearing whatever on the meaning of the expression.
When one says that a given TV show, movie, book, or whatever is “like Hogan’s goat,” he is just with reasonable politeness saying that “it stinks terrifically.”
