General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Liza on Demand

Liza on Demand is an American comedy television series starring the YouTube creator Liza Koshy as Liza, a young woman in Los Angeles who tries to build a career out of gig-economy odd jobs while her roommates and best friends Harlow and Oliver support and sometimes distract her. It was created by Koshy with the writing and directing team of Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, produced by Above Average Productions, and ran for three seasons on YouTube Premium (originally YouTube Red) from June 27, 2018 to October 15, 2021.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original run	June 27, 2018 to October 15, 2021, on YouTube Premium (formerly YouTube Red)²^•⁴
Creators	Deborah Kaplan, Harry Elfont, and Liza Koshy³
Seasons	3 seasons: 8 episodes (2018), 10 episodes (2019), 7 episodes (2021)⁴
Main cast	Liza Koshy as Liza, Kimiko Glenn as Harlow, Travis Coles as Oliver²
Premise	Liza takes gigs through an app-based odd-jobs service in her quest to become an "elite tasker"⁵
Season 2 debut	The most-watched YouTube Original debut episode in its first week, with 25 million views in 7 days⁶
Rating	TV-14; about 24 minutes per episode⁷

Spoilers

Premise and characters

The series follows Liza, who describes herself as "all side hustle and no main hustle": she drives for Uber, works as an Instagram shopper, and takes other app-centered part-time jobs while unsure what she actually wants to do with her life.¹³^•¹⁴ When she discovers that an odd-jobs app will pay more and provide insurance to workers who reach "elite" status, she commits to completing every task, staying in client demand, and turning the side hustle into her main gig.¹⁴

Her roommates are Oliver (Travis Coles), a realtor, and Harlow (Kimiko Glenn, known from Orange Is the New Black), a social media manipulator whose web-famous dog has attracted corporate attention.¹³ In seasons 1 and 2, each week puts Liza in a different odd job, from DNA sequencing to garage organizing to professional funeral crying.³ The third season moves the trio into a new apartment and shifts the dynamic when Harlow gets engaged.⁷

The in-app service's name is reported differently across sources: the Los Angeles Times review calls it Tasket, likening it to the real-world TaskRabbit, while Common Sense Media calls it TaskIt and the Production List summary calls it Taskbasket.¹³^•¹⁴^•¹⁰

Development and production

YouTube Red greenlit the series on November 20, 2017 as an eight-episode, half-hour comedy, with Koshy starring and executive producing alongside Kaplan and Elfont, the writers and directors behind Josie & the Pussycats and Mary + Jane. Courtney Carter served as an additional executive producer and Sam Childs as producer, and the show was made by Above Average Productions, a digital-first comedy studio founded in 2012 within Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video. It was Koshy's second project with YouTube and Above Average, following her 2016 holiday special Jingle Ballin'.¹

Principal photography for the first season took place in Los Angeles beginning in January 2018, with filming completed on February 23, 2018.⁸^•⁹ Season 2 shot in Los Angeles from March to May 2019, with Todd Biermann directing and Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan writing.¹⁰ Koshy also directed episodes herself: the credits record her directing two episodes across 2019 and 2021, and she directed an episode in the recently wrapped third season.¹¹^•¹²

In December 2020, while the show was between its second and third seasons, Koshy signed an overall deal with Westbrook Inc., the media company founded by Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith, Miguel Melendez, and Ko Yada; production on the third season was slated to begin in early 2021.⁶

Release and reception

Season 1 premiered on June 27, 2018 with all eight episodes available on YouTube Premium.²^•¹⁵ The official trailer, released June 7, 2018, drew over 6.5 million views on Koshy's channel, and the pilot episode has more than 57 million views there.¹⁶^•¹⁷

The Los Angeles Times television critic Robert Lloyd, who has held the post since 2003, reviewed the show as part of a wave of YouTube Premium originals starring creators already famous on the platform, noting the challenge of framing a personality built for three-to-six-minute videos inside a conventional sitcom; he found the first episode ordinary and a little stiff but the second episode better, with effective physical comedy.¹³ Paste's review of season 2 scored it 82 and noted that more of Liza's world was fleshed out, with more time spent on Harlow and Oliver and a slightly more serialized structure, while keeping the first season's "I Love Lucy vibe".¹⁸ Common Sense Media called it a lighthearted but well-written series about a generation whose lives revolve around digital entrepreneurialism, with guest appearances by Jennifer Esposito and Valerie Harper.¹⁴

Audience scores were cooler than the critical response: IMDb records 5.1/10 from about 1,200 users, and Metacritic's user score is 3.0, labeled generally unfavorable, based on 10 ratings.⁹^•¹⁸ The season 2 premiere was the most-watched YouTube Original debut episode in its first week, with 25 million views in seven days, and the show received two Streamy Award nominations, for Show of the Year and Scripted Series.⁶

Broadcast and availability

The third and final season premiered on Wednesday, October 13, 2021 at 3 p.m. ET/noon PT on YouTube, with the finale dated October 15, 2021.³^•² As of recent listings, the show is not available for streaming in the United States but remains available on YouTube Premium in Australia and 13 other countries.⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Comedy, drama, and general-genre web series › Premiered 2017 to 2021

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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