In Praise of Closed Captioning

It started, gloriously and ridiculously enough, with Footballers’ Wives. The prime time soap opera, which aired on the UK’s ITV from 2002 to 2006, popped up on my American television set, thanks to Netflix, right around the time the final season was airing across the Atlantic. The show, if you aren’t familiar with it, is one of the most staggeringly trashy and addictive programs I’ve come across in my life. It centers on the opulent and dramatic lives of WAGs of the fictional Earls Park Football Club and has everything—murder, money, women with impossibly long acrylic fingernails, secret love children (-en, plural, you read that right), and a Snow White-inspired wedding. It even has a character named Chardonnay. Chardonnay! (She was the one, as you might have guessed, responsible for the Disney nuptials.)

There was only one problem, and it was a pretty big one: I couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying. The combination of British accents, which were not exactly the posh kind, and the use of unfamiliar slang had me totally lost. In spite of the language barrier, I knew that Footballers’ Wives was a program I needed in my life. So I turned on the closed captioning.

I haven’t shut it off since.

Closed captioning, as it turns out, is both a great gift and an addiction that is hard to shake. I applied the practice of watching shows with captions to The Sopranos, oh my beloved Sopranos, and discovered that the delightful malapropisms that pepper the characters’ speech were enhanced greatly by being able to read them. Captioning made following historical dramas like The Tudors, with its many characters, similar names (why are they all named Thomas?), and heavy accents, a much less challenging endeavor. My enjoyment of Game of Thrones, where everyone has a different accent, the sound ranges from whisper-level to deafening from scene-to-scene and I never understand half of what’s happening even with the captioning, is helped majorly by the written word. (A side note on HBO: HBO NOW annoyingly doesn’t have a setting to automatically enable captioning, forcing users to manually turn the captions on for each individual movie or television episode.)

My captioning addiction even extends to The Real Housewives of Various Places (ours is a Jersey/Beverly Hills/Atlanta household) and has spawned a game of sorts that involves personally blaming Andy Cohen when the captioneers misrepresent what one of the ‘wives is saying. In Atlanta, the use of the words “ratchet” and “THOT” are routinely rendered as “wretched” and “thought,” while over in Jersey, poor Lexi Manzo was CC’d telling her aunties that she got into “Southern Virginia” University, when what she was saying was Salve Regina. (The New Englander in me was particularly incensed at that one. Respect the Salve!) We’re not the only ones to have some fun with captions gone wrong; sports gossip site Deadspin has a recurring feature highlighting instances of unintentional subtitle hilarity; “Anal Kid Time” at Yankee Stadium is a particular favorite. (That’s probably also the New Englander in me talking.)

Captioning is a hugely important part of accessibility for the hearing impaired. I don’t fall into that group of people, but my use of captioning has made me more sensitive to the importance of accuracy of the service. I would be more than willing to trade my little games for continued improvement to the subtitles provided for the hearing impaired, though for the time being I’ll take the fun where I find it. And I will never, ever, ever give up my love of Closed Captioning, even though everyone thinks it’s totally bizarre. But hey, it’s not as bizarre as a Snow White wedding!

Jolie Kerr is the author of My Boyfriend Barfed In My Handbag … And Other Things You Can’t Ask Martha, and the writer behind the cleaning advice column, Ask a Clean Person. Follow her on Twitter: @joliekerr

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