The season starts out pretty well with the same brilliantly original and well acted characters continuing to do great stuff with an often funny and sometimes laugh out loud script. I particularly love the naive lines that drop from Jason's mouth and Eleanor is so likeable and engaging.
For Australians though the cliched accents and set designs are very very distracting. I wish they had presented the setting as a SIMULATION of Sydney rather than the real thing on real Earth - then I could have relaxed and laughed at how bad it was. But you don't CREDIBLY make America into Australia just by:
- substituting Australian flags for American ones (we don't have flags in the corner of our offices unless we are the Prime Minister and the one on the University symbol overlaid by an American liberty torch, and an establishment year far too early to be likely and then placed absolutely everywhere was just silly),
- "subtly" placing koalas, kangaroos and jars of Vegemite in EVERY scene (why would a muffin cart, which is an American thing anyway despite its cliched Australian "down under" name, even need a jar of Vegemite?), and
- sprinkling the script with old-fashioned poorly-applied Aussie slang badly pronounced by British people (the word bonza pretty much died out 40 years ago - and you don't spell it "bonzer").
Other reviewers have said that the same thing happens when American accents are assumed by actors from other countries - but what we have here is in another league entirely. Its the equivalent of having a fake American TV character saying things like, "howdy partner", "you betcha baby doll", "right on man" and "hot diggedy-do!" every second sentence out of context and having plastic raccoons, bald eagles, Statues of Liberty and Golden Gate Bridges placed somewhere in every scene. You would surely be distracted by that!
The new character Simone's accent was the worst because it was played seriously and yet was so gratingly wrong. I'd rather see the accent deliberately faked and mocked rather than unwittingly rendered badly. (For example, she says "interesTID" like the British.) They had Aussie actors there in minor roles so I can't understand why they didn't use them (or get in others) for the Simone role. After all the British actor wasn't particularly valuable in terms of her input into the comedy or the plot. A poor casting decision.
Its a shame that even my review has been consumed and distracted by the "Fake Aussie" issue. As I said, I DID actually manage to enjoy the episode and would still recommend it to anyone.
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