Lonelygirl15

Season 1 Bree Avery (lonelygirl15), a homeschooled 16-year-old girl, begins posting video blogs on YouTube about her mundane daily life and her interests, such as science and her purple monkey puppet, P-Monkey. Her best friend, Daniel (Danielbeast), occasionally appears in the videos and uploads videos of his own, and a romantic connection between Daniel and Bree starts to form as tensions regarding Bree's family's strange, unnamed religion arise between Bree and Daniel, and later between Bree and her parents. Bree is soon chosen to participate in a mysterious ceremony for her religion, which she must prepare for by dieting, taking shots, and learning Enochian. After an argument between Bree and Daniel, Daniel starts following her outside and recording her while she prepares for the ceremony with her "helper", Lucy. Daniel discovers that Lucy has photographs of him on her computer and staged a fake ceremony with Bree to trick him while he was recording, and Bree asks her parents to tell the deacons of her religion that she no longer wants to go through with the ceremony, to which they agree. Later, the show moved to a bizarre narrative that portrayed her dealings with secret occult practices within her family, and included the mysterious disappearance of her parents after she refused to attend a "secret" ceremony prescribed by the leaders of the family's cult. ==Cast and characters==

• Jessica Lee Rose as Bree Avery (a.k.a. lonelygirl15), a bubbly teenage girl whose trait positive blood makes her the target of a dangerous cult called the Order. She gained a large following on YouTube due to her quirky video blogs. • Yousef Abu-Taleb as Daniel Barlow (a.k.a. Danielbeast), Bree's best friend, who only wishes to protect her, but is often distracted by romantic engagements. He can often jump to conclusions, and battles with an alcohol addiction along with his parents. • Jackson Davis as Jonas Wharton (a.k.a. jonastko), a boy who meets Bree online and discovers that his family has more ties to the Order than he realizes. He can be too willing to trust others, which often leads the TAAG (Teen Angst Adventure Group) into unfortunate situations. • Alexandra Dreyfus as Sarah Genatiempo (a.k.a. theskyisempty99), a misunderstood 19-year-old who develops a crush on Daniel and travels with TAAG. While she struggles to figure out what to do with her life, she harbors a dark and dangerous secret. • Becki Kregoski as Taylor Genatiempo (a.k.a. soccerstar4ever), Sarah's younger sister who has impressive computer hacking skills. A passionate soccer player, she has more social skills than the rest of her family and is often upset by their actions. • Maxwell Glick as Spencer Gilman (a.k.a. LAlabrat), an employee at Neutrogena with connections to the Order's science division. Chosen as a good role model for Bree, he sets out to help engineer a Trait Negative Serum. • Katherine Pawlak as Emma Wharton, Jonas's trait positive younger sister. She grows up significantly during her battle for her life against the Order, and goes out of her way to try to protect her friends. • Melanie Merkosky as Jennie, a former Lullaby Project employee who becomes friends with Sarah. She begins a romantic affair with Jonas and gives the TAAG an insight on how the Order's structure works. • Crystal Young as Gina Hart, Bree's trait positive older sister who was taken from her at birth and used as a lab rat most of her life. She is quiet and reserved, and feels more comfortable with art supplies than with other people. • Raegan Payne as Sonja, A member of the Hymn of One who tried to recruit Bree and eventually left the Hymn after she was badly beaten. One of the last videos in the Lonelygirl15 series suggested that Sonja had returned to the Hymn of One. ==Production==

Conception and casting After quitting a plastic surgery program, Miles Beckett, who was producing video podcasts in Los Angeles, discovered YouTube in 2005 after seeing The Lonely Island's video for their song "Lazy Sunday" on Myspace. At the time, YouTube was still mostly unknown. He got the idea for a fictional narrative story told through a series of ostensibly authentic video blogs, or vlogs, after watching videos of YouTube duo Smosh lip-syncing to the Pokémon theme song and realizing it was difficult to tell the difference between what was real and what was staged on the site. during a birthday party at The Gaslite, a karaoke bar in Santa Monica, in April 2006. According to Rose, episodes typically took about one hour to film on average. The series developed into an alternate reality game, with comments underneath the videos influencing plotlines in the series and getting acknowledged by characters, who would ask for viewers' help with solving puzzles. The first season of Lonelygirl15 ended in August 2007 after 260 episodes, with the season's final 12 episodes being released exclusively on MySpaceTV and Lonelygirl15.com over 12 hours. Bree's death at the end of the first season was prompted by struggles to renegotiate Rose's contract as well as requests from Rose herself to have the character die. Funding and sponsorships According to Flinders, Lonelygirl15 was largely self-funded in the beginning, and he and Goodfried went into around $50,000 of credit card debt trying to fund the series. Regarding the campaign, a writer for Gawker asked, "...does an internet celebrity carry any weight when said celebrity is more or less nonexistent?" Lonelygirl15 later became the first web series to include product placement when its creators signed a five-figure deal with Hershey's for Bree to chew Ice Breakers Sours gum in an episode in March 2007. The show's creators, worried that fans would be upset by product placement, posted a poll to the Lonelygirl15 website, to which 90 percent of respondents said they approved of the series using product integration. Around that same time, static pay-per-click advertisements were included at the end of episodes by Revver. In June 2007, while the show was being funded through fan donations, it was announced that Lonelygirl15 had signed a six-figure deal with Neutrogena to fund its second season, in which a "branded character"–Spencer Gilman, who worked for Neutrogena as a mad scientist–would appear. Bloggers and critics were polarized by the decision, which some described as innovative and others considered selling out. The show's end in 2008 was primarily due to a lack of funding as a result of the Great Recession. Following the reveal that Lonelygirl15 was staged, its viewership tripled. By the end of the series, each of its videos had collectively garnered over 60 million views on YouTube. ==Hoax==

According to Goodfried, viewers began commenting on Lonelygirl15 channel's videos with accusations that they were scripted after the account posted its second or third video. Many guessed that each video had been filmed in the same time frame and edited to look like they were filmed individually. Viewers assumed that the series was part of an advertising campaign, particularly for a horror movie or for Target, the latter of which was based on one viewer matching the SKUs of Target items with items in Bree's bedroom. Forum members surmised that Bree was based in Los Angeles in spite of her claim that she lived "100 miles from a mall", as the plants in her hiking videos, such as Nolina parryi, closely resembled those found in Los Angeles, and the music in her videos was often from unknown Los Angeles bands. Rose was also spotted at a Barnes & Noble in Santa Monica by a viewer, who later commented on a video about the encounter but denied that it was Rose. Forum members also discovered that Kenneth Goodfried, Greg Goodfried's father, had successfully applied for a trademark of the name Lonelygirl15. Matt Foremski found her identity through a cached version of her Myspace profile posted in a comment on TMZ's website. The New York Times also published an article confirming that Rose was the actress portraying Bree. ==Other media==

Spinoffs After launching the production company LG15 Studios, Beckett and Goodfried created KateModern, a British Lonelygirl15 spinoff. Since 2009, EQAL has aired two more spinoff series which are produced by contest winners, including LG15: The Last, which started airing in January 2009, and LG15: Outbreak, which began in January 2010. Relaunch In June 2016, on the tenth anniversary of the first video posted to the account, a trailer for a relaunch of Lonelygirl15 was posted to their YouTube channel, which featured Rose returning as Bree. The trailer was filmed two days before it was posted. Beckett planned the relaunch alongside Jenni Powell, a production assistant for the original series. Powell wrote in an email regarding the relaunch that the two hoped "to bring the show to a whole new audience while utilizing technologies that weren’t available 10 years ago to create new storytelling experiences." Speaking of the relaunch, Rose shared that a Snapchat channel for Daniel, a Facebook page, and an interactive website would all be involved, and clues about the series would appear in all three. To date, no relaunch has materialised. ==Reception==

Joystiqs V. Cole praised the interactivity of Lonelygirl15 prior to its reveal as a scripted series, writing, "The interaction between whoever's producing these videos...and the millions of players is intricate, exciting, and very game-like at heart." In 2007, Robert Capps of Wired wrote that the plot of Lonelygirl15 "has morphed from early-year 90210 angst to a confusing poor-man's Alias". Helen A.S. Popkin of NBC News opined that the end of the first season was "tragic", but "somewhat anticlimactic" and "lackluster", calling the season's cross-country trip plot "convoluted" and calling Daniel "tiresome" as a character; Den of Geeks Sarah Dobbs also remarked that "the plot got more and more convoluted" as the series went on. In 2010, Time included Lonelygirl15 on their list of the 50 best YouTube videos of all time. Legacy For NBC News, Helen A.S. Popkin called Bree "the unofficial face of Web 2.0", and wrote that the success of Lonelygirl15 "was arguably a driving factor behind Google's $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube, as well as MySpace's addition of short-form video to its social networking site." For The Guardian, Elena Cresci described the series as YouTube's first web series, and wrote that it proved to the public that making YouTube videos could be profitable. Because of the videos' early popularity, Bree is often described by critics as the first viral YouTube star. The series has also been considered influential on vlogging, especially on YouTube, and online video-based storytelling. Kyle Kizu of IndieWire described Lonelygirl15 as "the series that defined YouTube-based vlog storytelling", also calling it "one of if not the first [series] of its kind." In 2016, The Verges Sean O'Kane wrote that "the craziest thing about Lonelygirl15 is how prescient it was", as "Bree's vlogs don't look all that different from what you find on YouTube today." Refinery29s Meghan De Maria called Lonelygirl15 "one of the first major Internet hoaxes", while Heather Saul of The Independent described it as "one of the biggest internet hoaxes of the decade." In Times 2006 edition of their Person of the Year issue, which focused on user-generated content online, Lev Grossman wrote, "Of course, in the post-Lonelygirl15 era, there's always that question mark: How authentic are these faces on the computer screen?" For Eureka Street, Marisa Pintado wrote that the exposure of Lonelygirl15 as a hoax was "perhaps the moment that [the YouTube] community lost its innocence", adding that it "prompted many to ask why we are still so trusting of what we find on the Internet." Flinders similarly said in an interview with The Guardian that Lonelygirl15 caused everyone to "never trust anyone on YouTube again at face value." The 2006 Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "Weeping Willow", in which Michelle Trachtenberg played a vlogger named Willow, was based on Lonelygirl15. Awards and nominations Lonelygirl15 won the VH1 Big in '06 Award for Big Web Hit, and was nominated for Best Series at the inaugural YouTube Awards in 2007. For her performance in Lonelygirl15, Rose won the inaugural Webby Award for Best Actress at the 2007 Webby Awards. ==See also==