I’m just starting to watch the 1970s sitcom All In The Family. I’ve noticed that, right from the start of the series, the character of Michael Stivic is said to be from Chicago. But rather paradoxically he has a very pronounced New York accent, just like Archie and Edith Bunker. Now, I know that Rob Reiner, the actor who plays Michael, is from New York. I figured that maybe he probably couldn’t muster a proper Chicago (or at least Standard American English) accent, but the producers liked him in the role so much that they didn’t mind the discrepancy and hoped the audience wouldn’t mind or notice it either. But I’ve heard interviews with Rob Reiner, and he speaks with pretty much a Standard American English accent—you can hear some New York in it at times, but it’s very subtle.
So what gives? If Rob Reiner is perfectly capable of speaking SAE, why didn’t Michael Stivic speak that way? Is SAE something Reiner learned only later in life? Or is there some story-internal reason which I haven’t come across yet (I’ve only just finished the second season) which explains Michael’s very strong New York accent?
Watch this trailerof a younger Reiner plugging This is Spinal Tap. Notice that when he starts, he speaks in a much softer accent, but as he winds up for the sales pitch, the accent becomes stronger. Some of that might be shtick, but I think much of it is his lapsing into a more normal speech pattern.
Here’s a young Reiner on Odd Couple and on a 1975 episode of Saturday Night Live. A classic New York accent, both in and out of character.
My guess is he couldn’t do a standard Midwestern accent.
A “standard Midwestern accent” would not be the same as a Chicago accent. Listen to Chicago’s very own Dennis Farina or Gary Sinise (or either Mayor Daley) for fine examples of true Chicago accents. Maybe Reiner was trying to do one of those, but it came out more New-Yorky than intended?
If he couldn’t do a Midwestern (or Chicago) accent, then it would have been much more realistic for him to speak with the relatively generic SAE we already know he uses. Plenty of people from Chicago speak that way. On the other hand, I’m willing to bet that nobody from Chicago speaks with an accent even remotely like Michael Stivic’s. If Reiner could speak SAE back in 1971, I wonder whose decision it was to have Michael speak with a New York accent, and what the reasoning was behind it.
He’s also supposed to be Polish-American, but has a very Yugoslavian surname.
Rob’s speech, then and now, is what I would call Bicoastal Jewish Mediaspeak.
Yes, Michael’s supposed to be from Chicago, but it’s not specified when he came to New York. According to the show Gloria met Mike as the friend of a friend of a friend at her home in Queens. He could’ve picked up a New York accent along the way.