^ That one I know, thanks to my imported, off-air recordings of Father Ted which included the commercials from back in the day!
That's no excuse. I'm not only America, but from the South. If I can follow it without trouble, anyone can.
Southern dialects are closer-related to English ones than those in the rest of the country according to my old diction and dialect professor. There is some place in the south where, supposedly, they speak as close to 'colonial-era English' as you can get, closer even than any modern English accent.
You may be thinking of Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay. Also, Harkers Island off the coast of North Carolina.
She made that episode. Love her in Game of Thrones as well. I think she was at her best when she played Ms. Danvers a few years back.
Certainly, there's a lot of evidence that Shakespeare probably sounded a lot more like some Americans than anyone in England now or for the last 200 years...
Academic studies... basically, the early American accent was derived from the standard accent of 17th century England, and then we both diverged, but the philological studies of spelling and so on suggest that some American accents are probably closer to 17th century English than anything currently in use in England. There can't be any certainty about it in the absence of recordings, but the linguistic analysis heads that way.
^ Yeah, I remember that from college. Not so hard to believe when you think about it. England (and English) was a totally different animal centuries ago. I remember being very impressed with the HBO miniseries John Adams because they got the accents bang on.