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, eventually making Lonelygirl15 the most-subscribed YouTube channel.
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 one
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, take 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.