...but she's one of about a million actors who seem to think they speak Deep South in Texas. With few exceptions, they don't. (We'll start with the dropped rather than chewed r's.)
Still...she's forgiven.
She was especially good as the beleaguered wife in "The Stone Guest". Someday, when she passes away, the news will undoubtably show clips of her from Happy Days, but I think a better clip to show would be from the episode "The Stone Guest," where she plays the beleaguered wife. Her scene at the mine shaft was very memorable and should not be forgotten. But it will, it will.
As for accents of Southerners and Texans, Hollywood will never get it right and just doesn't care. Hollywood would never think of offending certain religious or ethnic groups, but Southerners and Christians? They don't count.
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Keeping people straight since 1958. No need to thank me - I already know you are grateful.
I'll have to check it out.
It so happens that when I was in a graduate film program, I did a presentation at a regional pop culture conference about the evolving uses of Southern speech in film and TV. Gist of it was that the more crooked and/or stupid the person was supposed to be, the more Southern he spoke. It's unmissable and undeniable. Even to the point where, for instance, you might get Jim Rockford (the private detective played by Jim Garner) out in the California desert somewhere, and if he runs across a crooked small-town sheriff, there's about a 90-percent chance that guy is going to speak Southern, or at least Texanish, for some unidentifiable reason. Designing Women was one of the first regular sitcoms to break this almost universal rule.
Actually, I also covered that as a sidelight -- the fact that the coastals and the Hollywood types seem to think there's no difference between West Texan speech and Alabaman, or Lousianan and Appalachian Virginian, let alone West Texan and East Texan. Not that they care.
Then again, I guess people outside NYC don't really hear a difference between Brooklyn and Bronx. And people outside New England don't really hear that much difference between Mainer and Bostonian and rural New Hampshire (Hampshiran?).
Anyway...your point was less superficially cultural like that and more substantive, and I don't think there's any doubt that you're right, not only in Hollywood but in nearly the entire news-and-commentary media.