Yeah, I often watch TV with English subtitles / closed captions on when it’s hard to hear for some reason, or they just have a lot of muddy dialogue (often compounded by accents). I can say for a fact I’ve seen this spelled out in captions at least twice, and they opted for “uzhe” as the spelling.
Of course, I’ve also seen a ton of bad captioning (for recorded rather than live TV, which is of course more error prone because they use the court reporter thing for the latter), where it seems like they’re barely trying to get it right. Liberal paraphrasing of long sentences into shorter ones, frequent blatant mistakes, etc. But at least the two times I’ve seen this shortened word it was consistent, FWIW.