"The Wire" on HBO

whoah!

brits ruin everything :(

lmao

is this british

http://www.escapemtl.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/avon_barksdale_story_unwired-500x703.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTe9LHtVp14

sounds like someone's trying to cash in by going straight to walmart

In the gritty television drama The Wire, actor Dominic West is the maverick cop who wins female hearts and cracks crime.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/04/27/article-1269086-0950A8DE000005DC-910_468x699.jpg

i mean how could you not

LOL @ The Real Avon Barksdale Story

the complete box set is $90 in today's amazon gold box deal.

Haha I was running over here to post that after I got it in my email. I'm ordering it.

was going to but the amazon credit card I have on file is expired and apparently there's no way to check for your new expiration date online : /

I noticed also that there's a 'lightning deal' for the next two hours where the beatles mono box is 150 bucks.

Dude you must have another card you can use!

lol yeah but I want my amazon reward points

Why do British people think Hugh Laurie's American accent is so terrible? *I* think it's really excellent.

it's probably just that we (well i) know him entirely for upper-class twit roles and they're hard to shake

feel the same about loads of completely competent accent-doing brit actors (eg rachel weisz), it's semi-irrational

and vice versa with american actors going brit

There are one or two people who do the American accent but certain sounds stick so for a long time they just sound kinda...funny until you pin it down. Like the FBI agent in "Fringe," which I really really like, but she once in a while throws a weird vowel out there and sure enough, she's Australian.

I don't twig that w House at ALL.

Or maybe she's just TOO careful to enunciate some things and it didn't fit with any accent pattern I knew of. I knew she wasn't American, but that was all.

One of the true joys of Wire watching is catching McNutty slipping into Brit for a second.

Yeah Laurie has just got it. Tom Wilkinson too.

i never even knew he was Brit until season 5. i never noticed anything awry at all; even after!

ah. figures i just bought The Complete Series like a week ago. still got a deal at $100 though. be warned: the packaging is really terrible. the dvd's are poorly secured and end up just floating around. they do come in thin little plastic sleeves, but they don't do much. you might want to invest in a little cd booklet for them.

yeah i heard. if it gets to me in good shape i'ma be pretty careful with it.

"Why do British people think Hugh Laurie's American accent is so terrible? *I* think it's really excellent."

I'm no Brit, but there is something overly monotone and Batman-gruffy about House Hugh Laurie at least in comparison to Blackadder Hugh Laurie.
There's weirdly similar scenes in House and the Wire where House and McNulty adopt deliberately bad Brit accents for comedy.

this is one of the few "complete series" box sets my wife and I own. totally worth it! a steal, even.

Yeah. The other complete box I wanna own is Twin Peaks. That's about it.

One of the true joys of Wire watching is catching McNutty slipping into Brit for a second.

oh totally. it was a weird thing for me, once I knew mcnulty was welsh, I couldn't not notice it. but I've known Laurie was English since I was a kid (mom loves BA) and I ~still~ can't hear any slipups with house

tho it really could be that he's doing that flat monotone thing---not a speech therapist but it seems like anunciating in an unusual (for the speaker) way would be easier when you weren't worried about inflection as much

also laurel otm re that Aussie chick on fringe. obv before I even knew she was Australian---something is just ~wrong~ every now and then

oh totally. it was a weird thing for me, once I knew mcnulty was welsh, I couldn't not notice it. but I've known Laurie was English since I was a kid (mom loves BA) and I ~still~ can't hear any slipups with house

Exactly the same for me and and agree about Fringe girl too.

I hate House's accent.

once I knew mcnulty was welsh, I couldn't not notice it.

once I knew McNulty was Uzbekistani, I couldn't NOT notice it! it's so blatantly obvious in his vowel sounds!

yeah, West is really posh...Yorkshire, I believe. Eton boys all the sound the same etc...

didn't history mayne go to eton?

http://markgorman.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/cameron-bullingdon-dining-club2_468x420.jpg
2. dcam, 3. history mayne, 8. boris johnson 9. dominic west

nice shades enrique

i remember some interview where laurie said he was very pleasantly surprised that people liked his acting on house since for the first season or two he literally wasn't thinking about anything other than making sure his accent was ok.

in general, american accents ARE more "monotone" than british accents. an american will start a sentence strong and end it weakly, and unemphasized. a britisher will often start weak and then end strong, raising the pitch at the end as well - which can sound more "musical" or whatever.

a microcosm of this phenomenon can be found in the two different ways of pronouncing "singapore"

monotone v girls aloud

Oh hey you just reminded me that the German Eurovision winner was a skiffle-beat song and it made me want to listen to Girls Aloud and I've forgotten to until this moment. Thanks!

What are the two different ways of pronouncing Singapore? I can only for the life of me think of one.

Actually I guess you're talking about SINGapore or SingaPORE. Obviously the latter. Sorry, this has nothing to do with The Wire.

wtffff, i spent like 200 total on the individual seasons

an american will start a sentence strong and end it weakly, and unemphasized. a britisher will often start weak and then end strong, raising the pitch at the end as well - which can sound more "musical" or whatever.

I.e. Brits speak in iambs, Americans in trochees?

tom wilkinson's american accent is ok, but it's not house good. e.g. i hear lots of problems here, and even more when he's acting on camera

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjTp3MSh-Vw

maybe this is actually sounds ok to americans because there are americans who talk like this? who slip into british? i've never heard them. although i had never heard a maryland accent until the last 30 rock.

ok that's not actually as bad as i remember it

One of the true joys of Wire watching is catching McNutty slipping into Brit for a second.

argh i found this one of the most annoying things about it!

ha that's true caek - he says "consyoomed" and "stahted"

my admiration for wilkinson's american accent comes from "in the bedroom" - he played a guy from massachusetts, where there's a lot more leeway there for non-rhotic r's i guess

but really it's all about the inflection - you can have all the technical aspects of an accent down right but if you don't emphasize the right things it just doesn't work - i think wilkinson has an ear for the way americans talk

chap yeah, there's a million microexamples like that - HOT sauce vs hot SAUCE is one that i notice... and there's the classic sport(s) divide - duh-FENCE vs the basketball chant: "DEE-fense!!"

cf Leee