‘Task’ unapologetically showcases the Delco accent

When Mare of Easttown came out in 2021, star Kate Winslet made headlines for her rendition of the Delaware County accent — a distinct variation of the similarly complicated Philadelphia accent that is notoriously hard to duplicate.

And, now, creator Brad Ingelsby’s new Delco-set crime drama Task is pretty close to perfect, at least in the accent department. This time around, we’re dealing with weapons-grade Delco drawls.

As a native of Ridley Township, I do not say this lightly. Even as someone whose first job was at the Folsom Ack-a-me, I am still shocked that Emilia Jones, who costars as Maeve in Task, is somehow not from Upper Darby or Marcus Hook. For the record, like Winslet, she is British, which somehow both explains that and makes it more impressive.

Jones and many of her Task cohorts — notably star Tom Pelphrey, a New Jersey native who plays Maeve’s uncle, sanitation worker-turned drug house stick-up artist Robbie Prendergrast — are, to be clear, doing a Delco accent throughout the series. Not Philadelphia’s famed Hoagiemouth, which is a subtle but important difference.

No, Delco’s version is somehow even more of an auditory belt sander. If Philadelphia’s accent is difficult to recreate, Delaware County’s take is pure verbal calculus — an aural mutation that can perhaps only be explained by the Delconian penchant for eating their Shorti off of a Wawa trash can lid. I grew up doing that, and the meme is only kind of a joke.

Even other people from this region cannot understand us sometimes. One of my own long-suffering editors has, in several instances, asked me to repeat myself because of how horribly I pronounce certain words, or run phrases together. And she’s from Montgomery County. “Yeaux, yeauh eye gahwt yore eduts.”

To Ingelsby’s credit, the focus on Delco appears to have been intentional. As he recently told The Inquirer, Task is by no means a Philly story — but rather a decidedly Delco one. Which is, at least for some, much appreciated, even if Ingelsby is from the much more rural Chester County.

“It’s a suburban story, I was a suburban kid,” Ingelsby said. “I don’t want to tell viewers, ‘Oh, this is about Philly,’ and they come in and go, ‘Dude, he lived in the woods.’”

Much of the credit for Task’s accent accuracy, it seems, can be attributed to dialect coach Susanne Sulby, who led the series’ actors through developing their characters’ voices. As Pelphrey recently told Esquire, the dialect work was important, but the theory only clicked after he watched a local TV news interview with a guy who had witnessed a fire on his block. It’s kind of like a magic trick — you have to see it to believe it, and even then it’s questionable.

“I watched this video a million times,” Pelphrey said. “But he said something like, ‘So it happened down the road.’ The guy goes, ‘Sow it happen dahn the rohhd.’ He only used it once.”

Task star Mark Ruffalo, who plays beleaguered FBI agent Tom Brandis, meanwhile, told USA Today that the Delco accent is so “weird and so idiosyncratic” that only his British costars like Jones and Fabien Frankel (taskforce member Anthony Grasso) were able to easily master it.

“It’s like the South meets Baltimore, with a little Italian and Irish accents sprinkled in,” Ruffalo said.

Despite all that, though, when a show like Task or Mare of Easttown comes out, the local media is apt to run a column like this in which the writer defends the Delco accent.

“It’s weird, we know,” we will say. “We have tried to change it, and we cannot. We did learn to say ‘water’ instead of ‘wooder,’ though. Sorry.”

But here’s the thing: The Delco accent needs no defending. Almost all the people I love have it. Inescapably, so do I. Whether it’s good or bad, or you wished you sounded this way or not, is up to you. Either way, it simply is.

For better or worse, Task mirrors what we sound like — and almost flawlessly to boot. It is insane, and glorious, and, to some, completely off-putting. And that is what truly makes it great.