Web drama wraps groundbreaking first 'season'

ByABC News
August 3, 2007, 6:00 PM

LOS ANGELES -- "LonelyGirl15," the sweet 16-year-old who set the Web buzzing last year with her playful and mysterious video blogs, will meet her fate Friday when the successful and influential show ends its first season.

Will Bree die at the hands of the strange cult that abducted her? Will her friends save her in time? Will she once again play with hand puppets and engage with best friend Daniel in the precocious game "Proving Science Wrong?"

The answers will come in 12 episodes to be posted one per hour starting Friday morning.

But here's the good news for fans: No matter what happens to Bree, the show will continue with its second season starting Monday.

LonelyGirl15 started with a test-the-waters video on May 24, 2006, posted on the video sharing site YouTube. The character Bree made her on-screen debut on June 16 in a video titled "First Blog: Dorkiness Prevails."

Nearly 260 episodes later more than most TV shows the series still ranks as one of the most-watched on YouTube and has expanded its audience to other video sites as well.

The "12 in 12" finale will air exclusively on MySpaceTV in a new deal with the huge social networking site. The episodes also will air on the official LonelyGirl15 site.

The online drama has come a long way in little over a year.

LonelyGirl15 burst onto the national scene in September, when reports began to surface that Bree was not a real 16-year-old home-schooled girl at all, but an actress playing a role in a scripted series.

Speculation was that some Hollywood studio was behind LonelyGirl15, taking advantage of the video blogging trend to hype some new horror flick or TV show, a la "The Blair Witch Project."

Finally, "The Creators," as they called themselves, confessed: They weren't Hollywood but LonelyGirl15 was indeed fake, and Bree was played by a then unknown actress, 19-year-old Jessica Lee Rose of New Zealand.

The three creators saw the show as a new form of interactive storytelling, involving the viewers in ways network TV or Hollywood films could not.