HBO/Warner Bros.
HBO’s The White Lotus has aired its final episode of its third season. The show had people in the United States and across the globe in a chokehold with its constant awkward suspense. But the show had an extra tight grip on a niche part of the country.
[Nat pop (clip from The White Lotus): Well Piper here is a senior, thank you, at Chapel Hill. I was also a Tar Heel. But Timothy went to Duke, Saxon graduated Duke, Lochlan, our youngest, just got accepted to both. So, if you can imagine it’s a whole thing.]
The show follows a group of vacationers in Thailand. One of the groups they follow is a family from Durham. This family, the Ratliff’s, sparked a lot of controversy and brought a lot of attention to the triangle area.
[Nat pop: Everybody loves the HBO series White Lotus. Everyone except Duke University.]
In one episode, the father, Timothy Ratliff, contemplates suicide…while wearing a Duke t-shirt. In a statement to the New York Times, Duke’s vice president for communications, marketing, and public affairs, stated that “Duke appreciates artistic expression and creative storytelling, but characters’ prominently wearing apparel bearing Duke’s federally registered trademarks creates confusion and mistakenly suggests an endorsement or affiliation where none exists.”
Tuck: The good news about the news cycle is that it’s relentless and it won’t stop. And so a new shell will come in, something else will pop into the zeitgeist, and by next year, will anybody really truly remember this?
That is Ryan Tuck, a Media Law professor at UNC. He emphasized the legal problems Duke would have if it pursued a lawsuit. Specifically when the Duke trademark isn’t used in a commercial way.
Tuck: The use of the Duke t-shirt or logo or brand was a creative decision. It wasn’t only to sell tchotchkes, it wasn’t only to sell t-shirts or widgets or subscriptions. So, when it’s not the primary motivation, then we get to things like fair use, descriptive use, things that have a robust and large protection under the first amendment.
Another aspect of the show that brought even more attention to the triangle area was the Ratliff parents’ accents. Victoria Ratliff, the mother …… created an accent that went viral.
[Nat pop (Parker Posey): Piper, no! Tsunami. Buddhism. No. No!]
The accent of the dad, highlighted the Durham area.
[Nat pop (Jason Isaacs): What about you, Loch? What are your goals for the week?]
Walt Wolfram, a professor of linguistics at NC State, says Isaacs Durham accent wasn’t authentic.
Wolfram: He says there are two unique vowels of Durham. I mean, we have done over a hundred interviews in Durham. We have interviews all over North Carolina. No linguist has ever said there are two vowels that are unique in Durham.
Brody McCurdy, a linguistics PHD student at NC State, says there’s no accent unique to Durham.
McCurdy: If you ask someone who’s black in Durham or who’s white in Durham or upper class or lower class, all of them are going to sound different.
Wolfram has an idea as to why Isaacs’ accent received so much backlash
Wolfram: Dialect coaches can just teach so much. So what they’re gonna do is pick a couple of prominent features of Southern Speech and focus on them. Which is why most authentic Southerners are pissed by that kind of speech.
The show as a whole certainly brought a lot of strange attention to the Triangle area. I’m Matthew Broderick, reporting.
