'The Most Popular Girls in School' Creator Went to a Santa Monica School

The creator of the viral “Most Popular Girls in School” YouTube series is a former Lighthouse student, Carlo Moss, who explained to the Santa Monica Patch how bad-mouthed Barbies became so popular with high school girls.

The series “resonates with a lot of people who are on the fringes of high school. It gives a voice to their frustration,” said Moss, 28. “Everybody knows all the Brittanys, the MacKenzies, the Deandras. They're obnoxious, and people love to see them parodied.”

MPGiS, as the series gets shortened into acronym, has topped 35 million views, which was enough for William Morris Endeavor talent agency to sign them.

Now into his third season, Moss has moved a month ago into a new Santa Monica creative space office and retired – finally – from waiting on tables and walking dogs to make ends meet. Between YouTube ad sharing revenue and Indiegogo crowd-funding, he can now dedicate all of his creative energies to skewering stuck-up girls.

There is a sense of empowerment in seeing this satire. Vicious girls – the popular ones – get slammed in every episode. Call it proxy revenge, but you feel justice-served when the girl who humiliated you in school – represented by archetypal Barbie -- gets lambasted.

MPGiS' humor derives from “The Simpsons” model, a childhood genre-turned-shock for adults. In this case, Barbie and Ken dolls exchange expletives as they jockey for popularity by treating each other cruelly. It just seems so inappropriate for bathroom humor to come from the perfect smile of Barbie.

But if MPGiS followed a familiar comedic animation model, it found fertile ground with a previously underserved niche: girls. Their viewer base is skewed towards 14- to 18-year-old girls, their subscriber base, towards 18- to 24-year-old girls, Moss said. The Simpsons and others series appealed primarily to men.

Moss was in my third grade class at Lighthouse Church School. I, like all my colleagues, predicted he would become a pastor. He was shy, extremely well-behaved and overly conscientious with his school work. When he wanted to crack into Hollywood success, I never imagined he would author f-word-spiked dialogues too bawdy for TV networks. Good thing Barbie can't blush.

“How did a good kid like me get involved in this?” Moss said. “After graduating, I thought I'd be famous in two years. I thought everybody couldn't wait to see me act in everything. Those dreams were met by a resounding nothingness.

“I got really tired of asking people for permission to audition. After two years, I said, 'Forget the system. Let's create our own series.' It's satire. It's art. It teaches people to have compassion on others. Even the mean girls get beat down so much that you can't help but feel for them. It shows that everyone is human. But our guiding light is to write what's funny.”

The series evolved from a sketch mid-2011 that Moss performed with two girls at the ImprovOlympic West theater (now called iO West). The threesome wore wigs, and the banter was about who was the Alpha-female. It produced a sensation with the audience.

Immediately, Mark Cope approached him about reproducing the sketch with animation. Quickly he became a partner. He films frame by frame the 4- to 10-minute episodes and brainstorms with Moss to generate ideas.

Next Moss reached out to a friend, the talented actor Lily Vonnegut, daughter to author Kurt Vonnegut. “I invited her to participate,” Moss said. “I told her I just invented a character who's the worst person in the world, and I think you'd be perfect for her.” (Good way to entice her to join!)

With her raspy voice, Vonnegut fit right in with the voice-overs done by stubbly-bearded guys acting girls' roles. Not only did her character, Brittany, become a mainstay on the series, Vonnegut decided to help underwrite expenses and so become the series' producer.

“We were using dolls from the 99 cents store,” Moss said. “She built the lockers for episode 2.”

The first episode got 30,000 views in the first week. Now, they have 34 episodes completed. Two spinoffs were generated, a number of behind-the-scenes videos produced – and now there are 90 videos in total to be seen by fans. They have an online MPGiS store, Twitter and Facebook accounts. Now, they add 3,000 viewers a day, and they have a stock of about 100 dolls.

And it all started with poop. Poop was the climax joke of episode one.

“When this first started to take off, I sat back and laughed at myself,” Moss said. “I'll never look back and get full of myself. My first successful thing was Barbie pooping. Remembering that is going to keep me grounded.”

While Moss didn't turn out to be a preacher, he credited Lighthouse with giving him a solid writing ability. “Lighthouse trained my writing,” he said. “I didn't like writing at the time, but it was a dormant skill that when I got tired of acting was ready to come to the forefront.” He graduated from 8th grade at Lighthouse.

If Lighthouse honed his writing, it DIDN'T provide the fodder of snobs for MPGiS, Moss said. “I had a positive experience in school,” he said. The ideas came from “waiting on tables in L.A. where you meet some pretty horrible people.”

In a way, MPGiS restores dignity to the defenseless, trampled-on masses in high school

At a YouTube-sponsored VidCon event, Moss and crew manned a booth with their dolls and some props. One girl came up – maybe 13 years old – and told them, “I just have to tell you that your show is the only good thing that's happened to me this year,” Moss said.

“Ultimately, it celebrates people,” Moss said. “It allows people to be who they are – even the mean girls.”