lonelygirl15 is an American science fiction thriller web series created by Miles Beckett, Mesh Flinders, Greg Goodfried, and Amanda Goodfried. It was independently released on YouTube from June 16, 2006, to August 1, 2008, and was also briefly released on Revver and Myspace. The series revolves around the initially mundane life of homeschooled 16-year-old Bree Avery (Jessica Lee Rose), who uses the username Lonelygirl15 online. She goes on the run with her friend Daniel (Yousef Abu-Taleb) after her parents' mysterious religion is revealed to be The Order, a blood-harvesting operation that wants her "trait positive" blood. The series is presented through video blogs, or vlogs, originally recorded solely from Bree's bedroom.
After discovering YouTube in 2005, Beckett, then a doctor, came up with the idea for a series of staged video blogs presented as though they were real, and set out to create Lonelygirl15 with Flinders, a filmmaker. The two wrote a script and came up with the character of Bree together. Greg and Amanda Goodfried, both lawyers, were brought on to handle the business aspect of the project and to manage Bree's online affairs, respectively. Bree's first few vlogs were posted to the Lonelygirl15 YouTube channel in June 2006, and they quickly gained popularity on the website, with users believing Bree to be a real person making videos about her everyday life. Lonelygirl15 eventually became the most-subscribed YouTube channel, surpassing geriatric1927, a position it held for 226 days in late 2006 and early 2007 during which it became the first YouTube channel to reach 50,000 subscribers.
As the series gained popularity, viewers began to question its authenticity, and users of the Lonelygirl15.com forum soon found proof that it was fake after messaging Bree on Myspace and tracing her IP address to the offices of Creative Artists Agency, where Amanda Goodfried worked. A story published by the Los Angeles Times revealing this information, as well as a post on journalist Tom Foremski's blog Silicon Valley Watcher revealing Rose's identity, led to the project being outed as a hoax in September 2006. Viewership for the series continued to grow after the reveal, and it experienced its highest viewership in 2007.
Bree has frequently been called YouTube's first viral star, and Lonelygirl15 became known for calling into question the authenticity of web content and for pioneering vlogging. Over the course of its release, Lonelygirl15 won a Webby Award and a VH1 Big in '06 Award, and was nominated for a YouTube Award. EQAL, a production company founded by Beckett and Flinders, produced several spinoffs of the series, including KateModern and LG15: The Resistance.
Plot
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.
Beckett met Ramesh "Mesh" Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County, California, during a birthday party at The Gaslite, a karaoke bar in Santa Monica, in April 2006. The two quickly became close and wrote a script, as well as a storyline for the first three months of vlogs, in two weeks. Together, they came up with the character of Bree, a quirky, homeschooled 16-year-old "girl next door" belonging to a strange religion who would post daily vlogs, occasionally with her best friend, Daniel, until one day she disappeared. When she disappeared, the two would make an independent direct-to-video film styled after The Blair Witch Project and based on the vlogs in which Bree's fans go looking for her. The idea for the film was eventually scrapped after the series gained traction on YouTube. Bree's character was partially inspired by Flinders's own sheltered upbringing on a commune in Northern California, as well as his knowledge of the occult. Flinders would later leave the series in 2007 to work on other projects.
Greg Goodfried, a lawyer and friend of Flinders and Beckett, was brought on to manage the business aspect of the series, while Amanda Solomon, Goodfried's wife and an attorney for Creative Artists Agency, was brought on to act as Bree online, which included managing her Myspace account and replying to emails sent in by fans. Grant Steinfeld, a software engineer from San Francisco, was also brought on to help distribute the videos and create a dummy website for the series, though he soon dropped out of the project. Before they found someone to portray Bree in the videos, Beckett and Flinders posted two video replies to popular YouTubers at the time on a channel titled Lonelygirl15. Using space and resources provided by the nonprofit organization Film Independent, Flinders, Beckett, and Goodfried held a casting call in Los Angeles, which they posted on Craigslist as The Children of Anchor Cove. After graduating from the New York Film Academy, then-19-year-old actress Jessica Lee Rose moved to Los Angeles to start her acting career. After finding the Craiglist listing, she auditioned for the role in April 2006. The three cast Rose for the role due to her youthful appearance and relative anonymity at the time, as she had only been to one other audition before that. Despite some initial hesitancy after finding out it would be on the Internet, worried that it was either a scam or a pornographic film, Rose agreed to take on the role. She later said of playing Bree, "I loved that character. It's one of my favourites that I've ever gotten to play."
Yousef Abu-Taleb, who had moved from Virginia to Los Angeles the year before his audition and was working as a server at Red Lobster, was cast as Daniel because of his "dorky", "unpretentious" look. Both Rose and Abu-Taleb were asked to delete or make private all of their online accounts by the show's creators before filming began. The cast and crew of the series were all required to sign non-disclosure agreements. In order to maintain Rose and Abu-Taleb's anonymity, both were given enough money by the show's creators to avoid having to work in public, and they stayed in their houses for three months until the series was exposed as a hoax.
In early January 2007, American Idol runner-up Katharine McPhee, whose debut album was being released later that month, guest starred in an episode of the series ("Truth or Dare") after her management team reached out to the show's creators. The episode featured a song from the album.
Filming, writing, editing, and release Rose's first vlog as Bree, "First Blog/Dorkiness Prevails", was posted to the Lonelygirl15 YouTube channel on June 16, 2006. It was one minute and 35 seconds long, unscripted, and produced with a budget of $130. The video used a broken desk lamp and natural light from a window for lighting, and was filmed using a Logitech QuickCam in Flinders's bedroom, which was decorated with furniture from thrift stores and Target, including a pink feather boa and a floral blanket, to give it the appearance of a teenage girl's bedroom. Bree was nonetheless presented to viewers as a real teenage girl vlogging her day-to-day life. Each of the channel's videos were scripted, though Rose frequently paraphrased lines or improvised around them in order to make the character seem more natural. She was instructed by the show's creators to study other vloggers of the time to build her character. According to Rose, episodes typically took about one hour to film on average. Two or three episodes would be shot per day, the day after they were written, and Beckett would edit them the day after they were filmed.