‘SNL,’ Kate McKinnon send up Philly burbs accents in parody of HBO’s ‘Mare of Easttown’ cop show
McKinnon’s character has an encounter with Gritty while searching the Pennsylvania woods. The Phanatic shows up, too, in a family photo on a cop’s desk. And Wawa hoagies get some attention.
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Saturday Night Live riffed on the Delco accent and featured a Gritty cameo in a parody of HBO’s Pennsylvania-based police show, Mare of Easttown.
The sketch “Murder Durder” (as in daughter, get it?) cast Kate McKinnon in the role played by Kate Winslet, a detective in a fictional Pennsylvania town investigating a killing. The sketch, subtitled “An extremely Pennsylvania crime show,” got a lot of mileage out of cast members vigorously saying murder and durder, and included two local cops, called “youse guys” by McKinnon, eating Wawa hoagies (pronounced with a thick serving of flattened vowels) over a dead body.
McKinnon chews into a line such as, “I don’t know what we know, all we know is what we don’t know,” with an accent that screams Philly burbs.
Later in the sketch her character has an encounter with Gritty while searching the Pennsylvania woods. The Phanatic shows up, too, in a family photo on a cop’s desk.
Winslet’s embrace of the difficult-to-master Delaware County dialect has gotten a lot of attention since the show premiered.
“I’m an actor who doesn’t like to get things wrong,” she said in a recent interview with The Inquirer about the importance of nailing the accent.
» READ MORE: Kate Winslet on HBO’s ‘Mare of Easttown’ and that Delco accent: ‘I’m an actor who doesn’t like to get things wrong’
The real Easttown is in Chester County, but the show’s creator, Brad Ingelsby, grew up in Berwyn and saw the fictional setting as an amalgam of such places as Coatesville, Aston, and Drexel Hill. The show’s costume designer leaned heavily into the Wawa aesthetic, a making-of feature on the show revealed, with the director saying characters’ clothes were inspired by the lived-in look spotted at the convenience stores.
» READ MORE: Wawa is ‘honored’ its customers helped inspire the costume designs for HBO’s ‘Mare of Easttown’
The sketch ends with one last jab at the region.
“This is where Joe Biden’s from,” the narrator says. “Wow.”