What regional accent is never portrayed accurately in movies or TV? (2015, house)
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I find what is widely portrayed as a "Southern" accent is often vastly overdone to the umpteenth extreme.
Worst southern accent I've ever heard - Kyra Sedgewick on The Closer. Just happened to catch it turning the channels once. HORRIBLE overdone, stereotypical southern accent. Embarrassingly so.
That old clunker Laverne & Shirley was set in Milwaukee and everyone had NY accents!
The characters on L & S who had NYC accents were written as NYC transplants to Milwaukee. The background story is that Laverne was born and raised in Brooklyn until her late childhood/teen years when Frank DeFazio moved to Milwaukee to start the Pizza Bowl and Laverne met Shirley at school. There is a two parter episode where the gang goes back to Laverne's old neighborhood in Brooklyn to visit her grandmother and attend the Italian-American Festival there.
In a few episodes of the first season Cindy Williams attempted a somewhat NYC accent in order to sound tough and states in her autobiography (and rightly so) that it was awfully done and served no purpose since Shirley wasn't written as being originally from NYC like Laverne so she dropped it after those few episodes.
The answer that jumped into mind before I even clicked in is CHICAGO CHICAGO CHICAGO, which often gets a New York accent for some reason, I'm guessing because "New York accent" is synonymous with "big city accent" to a lot of Hollywood people.
I agree, I think that the entertainment industry overuses the NYC accent to represent tough characters from any big city, which is false. The Chicago accent is not remotely anything like the NYC accent. Some of the toughest characters in Chicago's history (think Al Capone) were NYC transplants and no doubt had NYC accents, so apparently every tough person who ever lived in Chicago talks like a New Yorker.
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