Christine Baranski And Marc Evan Jackson Are From Buffalo By Way Of 1935 Connecticut

If you, like me, finished watching The Rebels and, after shaking it off and maybe putting on a Broad City to remind yourself that TV comedy isn't completely moribund in our time, you might have gone to the IMDb to pull up the profile of Marc Evan Jackson -- he played Phil, the guy who tried to buy the Rebels from Julie -- and remind yourself of all the places you've seen him lately, like Kroll Show and Spoils Of Babylon and Parks & Recreation and The Middle and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. And if you did that, you may have noticed, as I did, a little biographical information about Jackson -- namely that he's from Buffalo, New York. And then, you may have thought, "He must have gone to Christine Baranski's elocution teacher."

I am not a crackpot. I just think that Christine Baranski and Marc Evan Jackson may have overcorrected their Buffalo accents.

When I moved to southern Ontario in my early teens and started going "over the river" to shop in Niagara Falls and Buffalo, the western New York accent was kind of a shock. I know it's sometimes described as being characterized by "flat" vowels, but to me they sounded pointy, turning schwas into long "a"s. It's not that it's an especially harsh or unpleasant accent -- it's no south Philly or Long Island -- but it's definitely not one you hear much represented in pop culture...

...which may be why neither Jackson nor Baranski talks anything like anyone I have ever heard in western New York. Jackson's is the less noticeable of the two. Whether he's playing a fatherhood tutor, an Indiana attorney, or a space marshal stationed on Mars, he sounds as though he could go straight from there to a 1950s news desk and start reading copy: perfect elocution, defiantly accentless. Baranski's has a lot more character, such that she would not be out of place if she were sent back in time to play Katharine Hepburn's best friend. She's so aristocratic when she speaks that you'd never guess she's ever eaten a beef on weck.

To be fair, none of the people on IMDb's list of "Most Popular People Born In Buffalo" sounds like anyone who's ever checked out your purchases at Tops (particularly Kyle Chandler, which, what?). But neither do any of them sound like they should spend their off hours recording the official pronunciations on Merriam-Webster.com. Marc Evan Jackson and Christine Baranski talk so fancy that it's like they're trying to erase their roots, and being from Buffalo is nothing to be ashamed of! I'm not saying they should talk like their tongues burn from wing sauce, but a couple of telltale vowels would let us know they didn't just hatch from Fabergé eggs. I am not a crackpot.