Authentic Southern accents in "Friday Night Lights"

October 28, 2013 12:05 PM

How did "Friday Night Lights" get Southern accents so right when no one else can seem to do so?

I have recently begun a binge, started an addiction, and developed an obsession regarding "Friday Night Lights" via Netflix. I don't even like football, but this show is so damn good.

As a born-and-bred Southerner from the Southeastern US, I'm shocked that the accents on the show actually sound realistically Southern, despite many of the actors hailing from the upper Midwest, Canada, etc. Let me emphasize that I'm not saying they are perfect for that part of Texas - I wouldn't be able to differentiate that - but they sound authentically Southern to my ear.

How did the show accomplish this? It's outstanding to me because almost every fake Southern accent I've heard from accomplished, A-list actors has been terrible (I'm looking at you, Kevin Spacey in "House of Cards" - also a great show). I'm sure all of us have the same annoyance and that Brits despise fake Brit accents and Aussies loathe fake Aussie accents, and so forth.

How did they fool me so well? Did they hire some renowned Southern accent coach? Does that exist? I'm a scientist and know nothing about TV/film.

I'm so curious! I would love to understand how this works. I tried Googling but haven't found anything.

Thank you!

posted by Punctual to Media & Arts (19 answers total)

Just a thought: they shot it in Texas, with lots of locals as extras, so there were probably lots of good accents to imitate.
posted by vogon_poet at 12:11 PM on October 28, 2013

My guess based on only seeing a few episodes is that they hired a really good dialect coach. Yes, dialect coaches actually exist. Of course, the times you're hearing the bad accents, those productions hired dialect coaches, too. So I can't speak to why FNL succeeds where others fail.

The first thing that comes to mind is that they may have actually aimed for specifically Texas accents as opposed to "Southern", whatever the hell that even is. A lot of the time, when an actor sounds wrong to me (I'm also from the south), they seem to be going for a kind of Scarlet O'Hara thing that isn't representative of any real accent that people would be likely to have in 2013.

That said, Kevin Spacey doesn't sound all that bad to me.

One thing that occurs to me is that FNL ran for five seasons and actually shot on location in Texas. It's a lot easier to get into your character's accent day after day, for years, and to do it while immersed in a community where people actually talk the way your character is supposed to talk.
posted by Sara C. at 12:13 PM on October 28, 2013

As a person transplanted to the South, I know EXACTLY what you mean! I watched a Law and Order once where they went to Louisiana and the accent...so freaking OFF! Like Foghorn Leghorn or something. Besides Louisiana, and New Orleans especially, sound more Brooklyn than Savannah, and I think that the producers couldn't chance it that folks wouldn't GET that it was a true LA accent.

I think that after you've been here awhile, you do adopt a bit of a twang, I know I have. So in combination with a dialect coach, just chilling with the peeps will cause an accent to rub off.

I especially like how Jim Parsons hasn't lost his accent.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 12:16 PM on October 28, 2013

Kyle Chandler was raised in Ga. I went to school with him. He was so dreamy!!!
posted by pearlybob at 12:17 PM on October 28, 2013

What they said. Most actors doing accents are imitating specific people that they've met, whether a voice coach or just some random person (Forest Whitaker has said that his accent in The Crying Game is based entirely on a cabbie). For films, it's even more pronounced, since the actor will only have spent about a month getting ready for it and likely only have one example of that accent to imitate. But when you shoot a TV series consistently in a place, which takes months and months, in an actual place where actual people with those actual accents are talking all the time, it's a lot easier to pick up an authentic accent.
posted by Etrigan at 12:18 PM on October 28, 2013

I should clarify that, while shooting on location likely helps, the show would definitely have used a dialect coach as well.
posted by Sara C. at 12:18 PM on October 28, 2013

This month's Atlanta magazine talks to Andrew Lincoln (a UK citizen) a bit about his perfect accent that he has for Rick in The Walking Dead. It's an interesting read.
posted by pearlybob at 12:19 PM on October 28, 2013

Data point: I'm in Alabama, and am extremely critical of southern accents in films and TV, and I think while Kevin Spacey's accent is very slightly overcooked, it's not terrible when you consider he's playing a particular type of southerner: an educated, somewhat pompous jackass who's been in DC a while. There is a special type of "legisla-TOR" accent that politicians and lawyers from here all seem to get.

Anyway, another show that gets it pretty good is "Justified," on FX, (Timothy Olyphant).

What I notice is that the more the producers seem to think of the South as a real place with good and bad people in it, like any other place, the more care they seem to take with the accents. When they take this view of the U.S. southeastern states as some kind of amusement park or zoo full of people to make fun of, the accents tend to be very exaggerated and broad. It's exactly the same mentality that years ago made such heavy work out of regional/immigrant group accents in the NE (Italians, Swedes, Germans, etc.)
posted by randomkeystrike at 12:21 PM on October 28, 2013

There are indeed dialogue coaches. They probably have a good one.

As for "why are some accents so bad," there are a whole slew of ways to try to "learn" an accent, and sometimes an actor has to pick and choose which is the best way for them to learn. Some use phonetics, and carefully try to study how things are pronounced in a given accents' phonetic alphabet. Others do rote listening. Others pick a specific person to imitate. I've even heard of one actor who tried to learn a bit of the language the accent he was trying to study was based on, and then applying those language's sounds to English. If you're an actor who's only tried one way of studying accents, all without knowing that another approach is better for you, you're gonna sound stupid.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:33 PM on October 28, 2013

I think that after the question of physically shooting on location (which is a decision that has nothing to do with the actors and their accents), the rest of it is budget more than anything else.

A TV series doing a one-off episode in the south or with a southern character is pretty much 100% going to get it wrong, because most likely they won't bring in a dialect coach and will either hire actors who sound right to the producer/director's ears (so most likely all wrong), or hire whoever and say, "You can do a southern accent, right?" and then that's pretty much the end of the discussion.

Same for a low-budget movie where things like dialect aren't really the focus. (Contrast The King's Speech to Sharknado*, for example.) They're not going to pay to bring in a dialect coach, and anyone who really needs to have a specific accent of any kind is going to get a note, "You can do a [whatever] accent, right?" and then they try and it is what it is. And unless the production team is actually from the area in question, nobody is ever going to know or care.

Also, often the dialect coach is being hired to teach an actor an accent that nobody is actually in a position to judge. Maybe this actress totally nailed it. Maybe she didn't. None of the relevant people can actually weigh in because they're not from there.

*I just picked a random schlocky movie, I have no idea where Sharknado takes place or whether there are accents or whether they are good.
posted by Sara C. at 12:38 PM on October 28, 2013

I grew up in that part of Texas and I thought the FNL accents were spot-on. I thought it was especially appropriate that not every character had a pronounced accent. The daughter, for instance, did not have one. That's how it is in suburban Texas. Some kids have an accent, some don't.

Kevin Spacey's accent was another matter. It was so distracting that I gave up on House of Cards after the first five minutes. I wondered at the time what they were thinking, and whether the producers were too intimidated by Spacey to tell him he sounded ridiculous.
posted by vincele at 12:41 PM on October 28, 2013

Amen, @randomkeystrike - "There is a special type of 'legisla-TOR' accent that politicians and lawyers from [Alabama] all seem to get." Very well said.

My guess is for his South Carolinian politician character in HoC, Spacey is using a version of the same Mississippian prosecutorial accent he perfected in the movie "A Time To Kill," but for some reason it sounds over-the-top outside of the context of a courthouse in the Deep South.
posted by hush at 1:12 PM on October 28, 2013

I worked with a college professor who fell into a second career as a dialect coach; you can read about him here. He touches a bit on the many different Southern dialects in the article, but it was even more fun to hear him demonstrate the differences - whether defined by geography or social class. If you pay attention, you really can start to pinpoint where people are from, rather than just painting all Southern drawls with a broad brush.

(A personal sidenote: While he was working on "Cold Sassy Tree," he had my working-class Baltimore born and raised grandmother tape herself reading the newspaper, because Faye Dunaway's character was born in Baltimore and was supposed to fall back into a "less refined" accent when she was angry.)
posted by Sweetie Darling at 1:17 PM on October 28, 2013

hush, you may be right, which is why I'm not catching the "off-ness," if that makes sense. Another news flash to those outside the region - we have LOTS of accents around these 'hea parts.
posted by randomkeystrike at 1:18 PM on October 28, 2013

Another news flash to those outside the region - we have LOTS of accents around these 'hea parts.

You've reminded me of yet another possible explanation for "why some accents are good and some are bad", actually.

You're right, Randomkeystrike, that there are a lot of different types of "southern" accents - just as there are a lot of different "Irish" accents, a lot of different "English" ones, a lot of different "French" ones, etc. But film and theater often goes for a standardized version of those accents instead, in an effort to simplify things for audiences (and also, sometimes, to ensure it's not difficult for an audience to understand someone - some of the smaller regional accents, like the Geordie dialect in the UK, may be tough for people to understand what's been said if they speak quickly).

Of course, this can be annoying to hear if you know from personal experience that people from Texas and people from Georgia have totally different dialects, but actors playing characters from those areas speak exactly the same damn way. It just may not be the actors' fault, perhaps ("....They just said to use 'Southern', rather than 'East Texas'.")
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:30 PM on October 28, 2013

The above re "standardized accents" is especially true for the New Orleans Does Not Have A Southern Accent thing. Audiences will be confused or possibly not even comprehend a character speaking with a real Yat accent, so unless it's absolutely integral to the project* it's somewhat understandable that people tend to go southern when it's not merited.

That said, drive 50 miles north, east, or west, and everyone does have a southern accent, and a lot of people from those areas end up living and working in the NOLA area. So it's not incomprehensible that a one-off New Orleans character might have a southern drawl.

Besides, they always get Cajuns so wrong it's embarrassing.

*For example Stanley Kowalski goddamn better not have a Georgia Peach southern drawl, dammit!
posted by Sara C. at 2:31 PM on October 28, 2013

Ex-actor from the south here (yeah, I went to school to loose my accent. Now I'm always happy when I hear it coming back involuntarily).

IMO, the great thing about FNL is that every actor is working their own character's accent, rather than a mediocre dialect coach teaching them all one thing. The comments above about location, etc. are probably part of this. Also, the improvisatory style of a lot of the scenes surely required the actors to figure out how the characters speak in general rather than a reading of a set of lines. But I think the main thing is seeing "accent" not as a condition that someone has, but a part of a behavior repertoire that every person has for self-expression.

I agree with some that Spacey's accent is a specific, privileged, patrician accent. Growing up, if I heard someone talking that way, I knew pretty soon that they were either east coast southern from money, or pretending to be. IMO, he's doing a pretty good version of the voice that a lot of people mess up when doing, for example, rich characters in Tennessee Williams.

The other thing I just have to say is that dialect in performance, on stage or on film, is operating through convention, not through some transparent window into vocal "truth." The right "accent" in a given performance needs to be judged on its effect on the hearer, not in some imaginary perfection in relation to so-called "real" speech. Ethnograpnic listening has real value, but everyone speaking, even "ordinary" people being recorded by anthropologists, somewhat frames their own accent in terms of how they want to be heard.
posted by Mngo at 2:51 PM on October 28, 2013

The other thing I just have to say is that dialect in performance, on stage or on film, is operating through convention, not through some transparent window into vocal "truth."

* Points * Yes, that's it exactly. TV and film and...well, acting have some agreed-upon conventions for when it comes to what various accents are "supposed" to sound like, which they figured out partly through balancing "does it give an audience enough of an idea about where these people are from" against "is it still clear enough for the audience to understand what people are saying".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:23 PM on October 28, 2013

From 1999, here is a story on This American Life (15 minutes-- audio plays on link), in which a southerner investigates the cause of the rampant Foghorn Leghorn plantation accent work in TV and movies, and credits the New York-based (and now late) Sam Chwat, with spreading the wrong accent as southern. In particular he focuses on a performance of Foghorn Leghorn by Julia Roberts, an actual southerner (who knew?) who should've known better, or was paid not to.
posted by Sunburnt at 5:43 PM on October 28, 2013