In step with the emerging trend of web series’ producers electing to caption their internet-only content, “Oh, Liza,” still in its first season, is now available online with captions.
The series centers on the 25-year-old Liza Fisher after she moves from Manhattan back to the ‘burbs…and into her parents’ house. But her folks haven’t been suffering the empty nest as much as she had thought, and have welcomed the oh-so-popular Brendan as a lodger in Liza’s childhood bedroom. The four episodes now available follow her attempts to un-cut the cord in suburbia, which, shockingly, doesn’t go so well.
The whole thing is fun and funny, and self-deprecates those Millennials you always read about (and who created the series) — like this interaction between Liza and her mother in episode 2:
“Mom, I’m 25 on a lawn chair in my parents’ backyard in New Jersey.”
“Your point?”
“I think it’s pretty clear.”
One of the memorable moments comes in episode 4 when Liza goes to a house-party-turned-class-reunion, where none of her fellow high school alums (many of them also living with their parents, apparently) can put their finger on what Liza’s been up to all these years. Didn’t she just get out of jail? Isn’t she pregnant? Didn’t she die, “like, a few years back”?
But Liza’s saga is not nearly so eventful. Mostly her days are filled with normal kid stuff like lounging, envying other people, and hiding her cell in the freezer. You wonder how bad things have to get before Liza does something crazy and, I don’t know, applies for a job.
The series is captioned by VITAC and, as mentioned earlier, represents an emerging trend of web series choosing captions to make their content more searchable, accessible, and professional. Though the FCC does not currently mandate captioning for content that airs on the web but not on TV, adding captions allows for better SEO results, opens the potential audience to an additional 50 million deaf and hard-of-hearing Americans, and differentiates the series from an amateur project.
The show was recently featured on the captioned web TV blog, a site that promotes web series producers who caption their content.
by Carlin Twedt