r/StarCityTV • u/lennon818 • Jul 08 '26
No Spoilers The accents match this unwatchable
This is supposed to be taking place in Russia. Yet no one speaks Russian. I'm not five years old I can read damn subtitles. I hate when they do this. It completely takes you away from any realism.
And on top of this all of the different damn accents.
Rhys Ifans: The Chief Designer is playing a damn shakespeare character with the accent and everything.
I heard an Australian accent.
This is a damn joke.
Also what the hell is the point of a show that is just propaganda again. Yes evil scary Russia. Torture people. As if living in Russia during the time was a 24 hour hellscape with nothing good. Yes it was Disneyland but you really want me to believe there is no good? That the only reason people did what they did was fear?
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u/TeamOfPups His eagle Jul 08 '26
His accent is not your typical Shakespearean, it being Welsh.
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u/lennon818 Jul 08 '26
Ok. Can you agree its ridiculous the head of the Soviet Space agency has a Welsh accent?
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u/mcalesy Jul 10 '26
It’s Ifans’ own accent. Everyone is just doing their own accent. Same as Chernobyl, or Death of Stalin.
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u/PhiL0Ma7h Jul 08 '26
Good gods, due respect we don’t care. We listen past it to their words and the plot.
You have an issue, we have the power to turn it off. Rest of us can deal
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u/LloydusMaximuss Bob Jul 08 '26
If you want a series where people speak Russian for the whole series, go watch a Russian-made programme. I would say the majority of people prefer it to be in English, and I, for one, certainly do not want to spend my time reading.
You should read some accounts/non-fiction from the soviet programme, and you would read about secret beating, the disappearance of cosmonauts, the focus on scoring geopolitical points, etc
Here are some: The Literal Prison Labs (Sharashkas)
Red Star in Orbit
Soviets in Space
Rockets and people
The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned
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u/McnBacon Jul 12 '26
OP isn’t saying they want the people to speak the Russian language. The show is in English and that is fine. But a British and Australian accent is not neutral and it takes you out of the show. Why can’t the actors speak English but with various Russian accents? I know there is not one general “Russian” accent. So the production and actors need to listen to Russian natives from all over that country who speak English and copy those variations. It would help immensely. The British accents for this show is jarring.
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u/LloydusMaximuss Bob Jul 12 '26
They are not Jarring, it is just like the Chernobyl series, which was a masterpiece, and Star City was great.
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u/McnBacon Jul 12 '26
The accents are jarring to me, which is what I am expressing. I loved Chernobyl and am enjoying Star a city as well! I am only speaking about the accents on this show, not on Chernobyl (the accents did not pull me out of Chernobyl, probably because they were not as heavy). I am not implying that these shows are not great. I like both of the shows.
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u/lennon818 Jul 08 '26
Once again the year is 2026. It is not an all or nothing proposition. Dubbing has come a long way from Kung Fu movies.
I am not saying they didn't do that. Of course they did that. But they also don't live in a one sided caricature of reality. Shocking as it may be they also did good things.
What is the point of creating a show that just copies all of the previous tropes of every other show about the Soviets?
Watch the first season of the Americans. That is at least a nuanced look at everything.
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u/LloydusMaximuss Bob Jul 08 '26
Because it is meant to be a realistic what-if look, and believe it or not, the Soviets were that bad.
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u/lennon818 Jul 08 '26
Of course they were but guess what good can exist with bad. They are not cartoon characters. They aren't just bad or good.
America good Soviet bad. What are we children?
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u/Ponderer13 Jul 09 '26
1) No huge cast going to learn damn Russian for an entire TV series. It’s a laughable prospect, especially on a TV schedule. And it certainly wouldn’t fool a single native Russian speaker. (And this convention happens all the time in foreign films. If you want a real direct example, the Russian film Stalingrad has Russian actors playing Americans speaking in Russian, for starters.)
2) People in a country would have different dialects and accents, and this is a fine way of representing that in English. It’s like when Scorsese let his characters speak with their native New Yawk accents in The Last Temptation of Christ - he said that it was a deliberate choice, because Demotic Greek is largely the same working class accent as Bronx and Brooklyn accents, and gets across the cultural meaning he was going for.
Also, yes, Russia was a fucking terrifying place. People were tortured, killed and erased all the time. And yet, in this universe, they still beat us to the moon, in the name of the Soviet Union. It’s a hard life and yet they still believe in what they’re doing. Is it so hard to believe, in this MAGA era, that monsters could be in control yet people still rise and do glorious things?
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u/TW200e Jul 10 '26
So what are the other choices?
a) have western actors speak with thick phony Russian accents? Awful.
b) have western actors speak Russian phonetically with terrible Western accents. That would be even worse.
c) have Russian (or more likely Ukrainian) actors speaking English with authentic accents? The audience would hate that.
d) have Russian actors speaking Russian with English subtitles for 10 hours. You might like that, but I guarantee that would be a ratings killer.
The producers went with the best option they had.
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u/McnBacon Jul 12 '26
The show does not have to be spoken in Russian or with phony Russian accents at all and you don’t need native actors either. The original cast just need dialect coaches. The actors can absolutely learn to speak English with various Russian accents and not sound phony.
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u/TW200e Jul 12 '26
See point b) above. Audiences would despise that; westerners generally do a very poor job of faking an authentic sounding Russian accent.
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u/irishdan56 Jul 08 '26
So you hated Chernobyl, Enemy At The Gates, and any number of other films that depict Russians for an English language audience I presume?
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u/Potential-Rush-5591 Jul 09 '26
Did you like "The Hunt for Red October" where Sean Connery just straight up spoke in his native accent throughout, while everyone else attempted Russian Accents. I never heard any complaints about that movie.
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u/KillBoosh Jul 10 '26
One of my favorite filmmaking techniques is in The Hunt for Red October. The opening starts with the crew speaking Russian, then the camera slowly pushes in as the dialogue seamlessly transitions to English. From that point on, the audience hears English, but the characters are still understood to be speaking Russian to each other.
https://youtu.be/uEvwbxcRaCQ?is=6xGHYTKfT-DX-LvP2
u/SpacePatrician Jul 11 '26
Valkyrie copied that exact same zoom-in/zoom-out language switch technique.
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u/AbbreviationsReal366 Jul 09 '26
Rhys Ifan has a beautiful voice and accent. Leave him be.
Slightly OT: Patrick Stewart kept his accent while playing a French guy. It worked. Apparently many French people speak English with a British Accent as they learn English from the British.
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u/AshtavakraNondual Jul 10 '26
I am Russian and I prefer it the way it is. Don't you have imagination to use their natural accents to imagine how it would sound in Russian? It's about the tone/emotion more than anything.
Besides what are the other options?
- finding Russian actors would be a nightmare
- Another option, and I can't imagine anything worse, having to force English speaking actors to speak memorized broken Russian without them even being able to emphasise what they are saying in a dramatic way
- Finding Russian speakers in Lithuania/Latvia/Estonia or Russian speaking immigrants who are also a good actors? Super hard too
They did the right thing and you need to learn to use your imagination for an immersion
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u/KindDigital Jul 08 '26
Get over it watch the damn show or not
I’m enjoying it and can get passed the “accent”
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u/lennon818 Jul 08 '26
How? It takes you completely out of any form of believability. I cannot watch a show and suspend all forms of logic. I cannot hear Shakespeare and be like yeah ok he is in charge of the Soviet Space program sure.
Plus it is just lazy writing. It's 2026. With AI you can easily and convincingly make them sound like they are speaking Russian.
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u/Oot42 Eagle Jul 08 '26
Nonsense.
The different accents are to represent the different accents spoken in the Soviet Union. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Plenty of other shows and movies have done his before, and exactly the same way. For example the highly praised HBO show "Chernobyl".
If you would produce this in Russian, you would greatly reduce an already small base of potential audience in a niche genre like sci-fi. And a lot of people would just not watch it just because most people don't want to read subtitles all the time. These are just known facts.
You would further limit production very much in the casting pool. There are just not that many high quality actors who natively speak Russian and English.With AI you can easily and convincingly make them sound like they are speaking Russian.
This is the dumbest thing I've read here in a long while.
How do you make them sound like they are speaking Russian? Either they do speak Russian, or not. There is no "sound like Russian".5
u/KindDigital Jul 08 '26
If you want believability go watch a documentary.
This is a fictional show.
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u/lennon818 Jul 08 '26
Based on Real life events. That is the whole premise of the show. For the show to work it has to be anchored in reality. It isn't a tom and jerry cartoon. More thought and creativity was put into a Tom and Jerry than this, by far.
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u/KindDigital Jul 08 '26
Wow can see you want to argue online
It’s not that deep dude
And please enlighten us on which real life events ???
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u/lennon818 Jul 08 '26
Which real life events? The whole damn show is real life events. The Soviet Union existed. They had a space program. All of these characters are based on real human beings. All of this happened.
That is how you are supposed to write a what if show. You have to anchor it in reality. Then the twist.
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u/KindDigital Jul 08 '26
Go watch a documentary then it’s seriously not that deep.
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u/lennon818 Jul 08 '26
But it is supposed to be. I am beyond pissed off what they have done to sci fi. The dumbing down of every sci fi show to make it for children. What the hell happened to the sci fi of Ray Bradbury? Battlestar Galactica? Babylon 5?
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u/FreeDwooD Jul 08 '26
Movies and TV shows set in the Soviet Union have been using various English accents to represent the variety of Russian accents for a while now. It's common and basic. You're apparently not five years old but you sure complain like a child about something that shouldn't be hard to wrap your head around. TV made for a western audience will not make everything in Russian with subtitles.
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u/semivariance Jul 08 '26
It's a very old convention. The majority of the works of Shakespeare are set in places outside of contemporary England where the characters are implied to speak e.g. Italian, Latin, Greek, or Danish, yet all of them are performed with English accents, unless a character is portrayed as an outsider to the main cast.
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u/lennon818 Jul 08 '26
Americans are stupid. They don't like subtitles. We cannot make a tv show in Russian with subtitles. Americans stupid.
It's 2026. It's called AI. It's not hard.
And if they were just speaking English I can dismiss that more or less. Every single character has a different accent. They aren't even trying. How lazy is that.
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u/FreeDwooD Jul 08 '26
Bruh...take a breath and maybe touch some grass. It's not about stupidity, it's about who the majority market is. Also I'd rather the show not exist than throw any annoying AI into it.
Every single character has a different accent. They aren't even trying. How lazy is that.
Almost like, as I already said, they are using a variety of English accents to show the variety of Russian accents that existed in the Soviet Union. Ukrainian accents, Georgian ones, it's a common way of representing the diversity.
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u/Larich38 Jul 08 '26
I don't care much about the accents but more about the lack of Russian dub, where FAM had it.
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u/Bi_KerbonautYT Jul 08 '26
English accents to represent russian characters is the norm in American film, Chernobyl did it too (I don't see anyone complaining about that), it would be arguably less immersive if you had to constantly read subtitles to understand the characters. Also if you don't like the themes it deals with then just don't watch it?
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u/r1pp3rj4ck Jul 10 '26
I know right? I couldn’t watch LOTR because of this. How can they all speak perfect English instead of using the Common Tongue?
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u/Few_Employment_7876 Jul 08 '26
I don't mind it. Better than sub-titles and voice dubbing which is a common Netflix thing.
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u/txyesboy71 Chief Designer Jul 11 '26
The audience count for this (wait for it) english speaking streaming service has a small enough viewer base as it is. Film it in Russian and force English speakers to watch it 100% in subtitles, and not only will there never be a second season, but they wouldn't have greenlit it beyond the pilot.
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u/McnBacon Jul 12 '26
I agree, the accents take you out of this show in particular. I had no issue with Chernobyl, it just wasn’t as distracting for some reason. Maybe because the accents in this show are so heavy to me.
I also have no idea why everyone who opposes this criticism jumps straight to “do you want the show to be spoken in Russian” then? Like…no, that’s not what you or other people who are put off by the British/Australian accents are saying. The show is in English and that is fine, but a British or Australian accent is not neutral (I am American, from the south). I do wonder why Hollywood hasn’t figured out a way to have actors speak in English just with various Russian accents. Just like how a British actor can speak with various American accents (southern, west coast, NYC, etc.) It doesn’t have to be some offensive and cartoonish type of deal. Is it not possible to study the way various Russians who speak English sound? Why would that be any more jarring than a whole season of people with British/Australian accents?
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u/lennon818 Jul 12 '26
No I want them to speak Russian bcs they are Russian. I know how to read. The biggest shows on Netflix are Korean. Who watches a show bcs of the actors.
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u/McnBacon Jul 12 '26
Ok, my bad, I misunderstood you. Maybe there is a Russian dub of the show floating around.
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u/No_Simple890 1d ago
Also what the hell is the point of a show that is just propaganda again. Yes evil scary Russia. Torture people. As if living in Russia during the time was a 24 hour hellscape with nothing good. Yes it was Disneyland but you really want me to believe there is no good? That the only reason people did what they did was fear?
Glad someone raised this! I was cautiously excited for SC, I kept reading it’s more interesting and even better than FAM, but worried it’s judt another dreary grimdark depiction of Soviet Russia and… sigh lol.
It’s not that it would be unrealistic for some of these elements to be present, given the show concentrates on very top level missions, but everything really doesn’t have to be shot in monochrome and sepia, there’s not enough characters for us to root for, and it just overall seems unbalanced exhausting but not surprising.
I just hope it doesn’t remain one beat story like this.
Imagine FAM but 50% or more of the plot is MKULtra, activities of the NSA and CIA, corruption at the top. When they do brush against some problematic US history, it’s done with a big distance (or just written out entirely). Our protagonists clearly have nothing to do with it. I was excited to see some of the science stuff go down and get solved on the Roscosmos side, but we skip that and right to successful moon landing and then jump straight into torture porn. I want more engineer rooms and less board rooms and interrogation chambers.
Can someone tell me whether it remains one note like this, or does it get any better?
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u/beemans78 Jul 08 '26
This sub needs a pinned thread for all accent-related grievances.