Flipgirl Speaks: Charlotte Nicdao on Going Viral in ABC Comedy "Content"

 Television 
“It is amusing to see how predictably the internet loves to take down what they perceive to be a dumb woman making a mistake.”
By Simon Miraudo  •

"Don’t stream and drive, thot..."

...is how @ArsonArtist introduced a clip—apparently from a young Australian woman’s Facebook livestream—of her rolling a car in a crash after absentmindedly singing Vanessa Carlton’s "A Thousand Miles".

Within a week, the clip had been viewed more than four million times, collecting comments like "dumb b****", "this is some final destination s***" and, from a Tweet I’m assuming was written by the Joker himself, "Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!"

Others instantly suspected it was a hoax. I couldn’t find anyone asking if she was okay.

As we now know, it was kind of a hoax, though that’s not quite the right word from it: firstly, because the clip was actually excised from the new ABC vertical comedy series Content, which has been specifically filmed to mimic the phone display of would-be influencer Lucy (Charlotte Nicdao); and secondly, because, well, Nicdao really did get flipped inside a car to pull off the shot.

"Weirdly, it felt a lot less scary in the car than it looks from the outside," she tells Student Edge.  

"When you look at it from the outside, you’re like, 'Woah, that car is rolling upside down and teetering on its roof.'"

Thankfully, on the day, the stuntmen reassured her: "These are structures that are built to roll and keep the person inside safe. There’s kind of nothing you can roll in more safely."

When Lucy gets T-boned into online infamy, she gains the moniker #flipgirl and embraces memehood. Life indeed imitated art for the very funny Nicdao—who makes us sympathetic to Lucy's airheaded and ultimately heartrending obsession with her phone—when the excerpt from Content’s first ep went viral.

"I’m a millennial, and I know that for me, nothing is quite so alluring as my phone screen, so we hoped that by creating a story that was told through that medium, you’d be able to capture people’s attention without them being distracted in a way that normal TV series or films almost can’t," she says.

"But the viral nature of what’s happened, I mean, look, of course you hope something like that will happen, but it’s pretty bizarre to watch unfold, even though it is literally what happens in the first episode of the show."

Still, it didn’t happen by accident.

She credits Anna Barnes, the show’s writer, for solving the first episode’s brief: "What is something that is guaranteed to capture the attention of the internet?"

They found the answer: "A silly girl hurting herself."

"It is amusing to see how predictably the internet loves to take down what they perceive to be a dumb woman making a mistake," Nicdao says.

"The filmmakers wrote comments to display in the episode of people calling her stupid or a dumb b**** or whatever, and here are these exact comments floating through the real internet in real time. Call it sad, I don’t know if it’s ironic or the opposite of ironic, but I guess that’s one of the things that the internet does very well."

She insists Content, which also stars Gemma Bird Matheson as Lucy’s grounded friend Daisy, isn’t really condemning internet culture, despite the sometimes misogynistic feedback from those who were so ready to believe her car-flip was real.

"In a lot of ways the show is about how there’s some kind of connection and solidarity you can only find online and that’s wonderful," she says.

"While some of the responses to the crash vid have shown an ugly side of the internet, there’s also something incredible about the combined consciousness of millions of people all laughing, being concerned, being sceptical together."

"That’s the crazy thing about quote unquote going viral," she adds.

"I’ve watched this clip that was something a small team of filmmakers made kind of become a sort of monster that belongs to the internet, which is weird and cool I guess."

Next, she’ll watch on as the internet responds to the rest of the seven-episode series, which is being drip-fed online weekly by ABC. ("I do think the show gets better and better as it goes along.")

After that, she’ll be seen by even more millions on Apple TV+’s new show Mythic Quest, from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Rob McElhenney.

"This [Content] experience has been wholly unexpected despite all the ways in which we thought about it might be received," she says.

"So I have to imagine that the release of anything else that I ever do is gonna go the same way; I’m not gonna go in with any expectations."

Content is available on ABC iView, as well as YouTube, Facebook and IGTV.

Header Image: ABC