Sam's rapid change
Sam changed an awful lot early in the series. She had quite a growth spurt and totally lost that thick Brooklyn accent.
shareIf I had to pick one thing I don't like about this show (and honestly, there aren't many) it would be that Samantha changed from this totally cute, spunky, Brooklyn tomboy to the typical sitcom teenage girl.
Daria: We are now entering Hell. Please keep your hands and elbows inside the car.
JBOP 2635467
Well Samantha grew up and brooklyn so that's why she was a tomboy, she got in alot of fights because she lived in a bad area. After living in a good area there was no reason for her to be a little toughie anymore. That was the reason Tony wanted to move remmeber? To give his daughter a better life.
Also as Angela mentioned, "tomboys grow up" it wouls be silly to keep Sam a tomboy during her teenage years. She became a typical sitcom girl because, that's how typical teenage girls are! I think I was a typical teenage girl during my teens and from wat I remember most of the girls in mt highschool were as well.
The early teen years is usually the age wear girls mainly care about clothes, makeup and boys. Think about it!
I didn't mind the change. I loved Sam and her typicalness.
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I see where you're coming from with the Jo comparison from Facts of Life, but keep in mind that the whole point of Jo was to have her clash with the rich princess types at school. That resulted in the majority of the episode plots.
I'm guessing that without a specific school setting to regularly contrast Sam against, there was nowhere for them to go keeping her as a standard tomboy. In order to keep her school story lines from becoming the focus of the whole show (always showing how her ways conflicted with the upper-middle-class students ala Facts of Life) which it wasn't supposed to be, she had to bring home giggly typical-teen types to blend with. The majority of the show was supposed to be about Tony in such a submissive job position to a powerful woman. It wasn't supposed to be about Sam's awkwardness as a perpetual tomboy.
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Yeah, that makes sense the way you describe it. Essentially, they could have made Sam a much more complex character than they did. I do agree that Jo on "Facts" was a very fleshed out character who grew slowly over time (and I don't know if you followed the reunion episode some years back, but she stayed true to her spunky nature and ended up a police officer.)
Don't get me wrong; I was never a huge "Sam" fan and I hated her ridiculously young marriage in the final season (I posted about that somewhere here recently.) I just do think they deliberately kept her shallow because I don't think she was supposed to end up such a huge teen draw; she did and they were pretty much screwed in how they'd shaped her personality at that point.
Although there WAS that one-time-only episode during her early "popular girl" years when she wanted to be on the basketball team but was afraid of turning off some guy she had a crush on. She ended up on the team anyway...but they never went anywhere with that after that one episode and her involvement in sports was never mentioned again.
Episodes 3.1 and 3.2 were aired this morning:
Angela, Tony and the kids are in Mexico on vacation, and her company loses an $8 million toilet paper account, and Angela gets blamed and fired, (she took the vacation saying she would be available, but Tony didn't pass her a message, "We lost the toilet paper", and she actually took vacation, which the CEO never did!). At one point, Sam is on the phone with Marci (with Brooklyn accent) saying she can't go back to Brooklyn without her accent!
(BTW or FYI, an accent is more noticable over the phone!)
I'm old enough that I saw some of the original broadcasts, and some of the interviews with Alyssa... She originally wanted to lose the Brooklyn accent, but the show wanted her to emphasize it, and she did, so it was extra thick originally. In season 3, she was wearing big shirts to cover the fact that she had reached puberty. In the 3.1 beach scenes, she had one of the big shirts over her 1-piece swimsuit. In an interview, (remember this is an actress speaking), she said some of the show's cast REALLY DID go shopping with her for her first bra. The show did an episode about Sam's first bra, so, who knows...
I have had the opportunity to travel some, and I've noticed accents enough to comment about people and their accents, so I will. In my own family, my younger sister had friends with a "twang", and she grew up with that accent, in spite of the rest of our family having the more typical midwest "no-accent". She STILL has that "twang", and the same friends. Sam would have realisticly lost a LOT of that Brooklyn accent with new friends in Connecticut, but **some** words and phrases would naturally have remained without speech lessons.
My wife and I hosted high school age foreign exchange students, and I was actually able to recognize regional accents of the Brazilian students, even without speaking the language. That ability was very surprising to some of them when I could listen to them speaking for less than a minute, and identify where they grew up, and had travelled. I have some limited ability to do the same with people in the U.S., but there are more regional accents than areas I have visited.
All that said, "Sam's" accent was deliberately emphasized in the first several seasons, and she literally grew up, so the "change" wasn't as rapid as it seemed.
Outside the show, she did singing (5 CD's that I have seen), and was VERY popular in Japan. Taking that accent to Japan, she would have been nearly impossible for them to understand, even more so in singing, so she lost the accent somewhere in her music career/side-gig.
BTW, the only comedian all the exchange students could understand, and laugh at the jokes was Bill Cosby. He had/has very little accent, and spoke "leisurely" during his shows, with stories and jokes nearly everyone has experienced. So it went with Alyssa...