Last year, there was a lot of debate over whether YouTube sensation lonelygirl15 was real or an actress, and a lot of earnest discussion about what that question meant for online ethics and the new media’s effect on narrative. Well, it’s 2007 now, it turned out she was an actress, the ethical/narrative debate was like all blah blah blah whatever, and now we can all concentrate on the important business of trying to get paid. To which end, lonelygirl15, Variety reports, has struck a deal to write a gigundous placement deal for Neutrogena into the script.
Anyway, what caught my attention was not so much the what of the deal but the how:
Show’s new character, who will make his first appearance Monday and appear in episodes over the next two months, had already been conceived by the show’s creators, Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, as a 22-year-old scientist who helps the series’ lead characters create a serum in order to thwart an evil org known as the Order.
He’s a who who creates a what to thwart the which? OK, I’ll admit, I haven’t followed lonelygirl15 since the denouement of the whole is-she-an-actress hoo-hah last year. But what I recall was a winsome-enough story about a girl with a couple of weird parents who may or may not have been Satanists and a guy friend who had a crush on her. Can anyone explain to me when exactly it turned into Alias? At what point does she fight her sister for a hidden artifact created by a 16th-century Italian genius?