The internet is a cold and dark place, often rotten, corrupted, ugly, disturbing, far-removed from its original purpose, and so on. However, teetering around the black, oily, post-BP surface is a handful of television gems that have never seen a television screen. Unless you, you know, hooked up your computer via HDMI cable to a TV – that’s a thing that happens.

Anyway, in the aim to provide critiques to the uncriticised, the TV section is deploying its forces to review the TV of the internet age. We’re starting by going backwards to a different time, a lost age of the internet – 2006. A more innocent time where people took what they could get on the internet and didn’t properly question its content. In this potent environment, one of the greatest internet phenomena ever was born; the girl, the myth, the legend that is, lonelygirl15.

lonelygirl15 was the fake username of Australasian actress Jessica Rose, who, under the guidance of three film makers from California made a series of fake vlogs where she pretended to be Bree, a 16-year old school girl.

Initially this began some of the most ridiculous interactive trolling ever witnessed, where ‘Bree’ talked about nothing for hours and hours and answered lurid, disgusting emails innocently – claiming in one absolutely brilliant moment to not know what a blowjob was. Rose’s talent to playfully and innocently pander to the audience was a charm to watch, though this is with historical hindsight.

However, Bree’s tale soon took a turn for the bizarre as more characters entered the fray. Bree claimed to be a ‘trait positive girl’, sought after by the secret organisation known as ‘the Order’. At this stage, lonelygir15 took a turn for the worse. The ‘creative’ powers obviously bit off more than they could chew, and the realism was totally suspended. Bree was outed as a fake, and lonelygirl15’s popularity declined – until it ended about a year later in 2008.

This second stage of the show was also much weaker, characterised by overacting, asinine dialogue and awful, awful audience interaction. Gone were the lurid old men reading seedy comments, gone were the teenage boys begging for attention. Bree wasn’t interested in pandering anymore; she was too concerned with evading ‘the Order’. It sucked.

lonelygirl15 is an example of a television show that forgot what made it popular or what made it great. It declined, becoming a mere footnote in creative uses of the internet, but remained a sign that internet television had potential – it generated 110 million views over it’s one and a half year period.