A new ABC made-for-smartphone series has gone viral after a clip of a fictional car crash during a Facebook live stream was mistaken by many as a real accident.

Anyways... someone in NY with 500 followers has clipped that bit out of the ep and posted it like it actually happened... AND IT'S NOW GOING VIRAL pic.twitter.com/Z8M5o64YqP — Nathan Bazley (@NathanBazley) September 5, 2019

The clip has had more than 1.2m views on Twitter.

While some viewers knew it was an actor pretending to crash her car, others seemed to miss the fairly obvious signs it was fictional, and some even sympathised.

It wasn’t her fault because “somebody t-boned the shit out of her” and “I’m glad she’s OK because that was hilarious”, were just some of the responses.

The seven-part narrative series, Content, premiered on Wednesday on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and iView and has been given a major publicity boost after it was shared thousands of times on social media sites Twitter, Reddit and Facebook.

The comedy features a young Brisbane woman called Lucy who wants to become an online influencer so she keeps the camera running no matter what happens to her – even a car crash. The slapstick comedy is pretty hard to miss though so it’s surprising some people were fooled.

The actor who plays Lucy, Charlotte Nicdao, was just as amazed by the clip’s fame as everyone else, sharing it with the words “DAISY IM VIRAL”, a quote from the show.

And just to wrap this whole insane thing up, here is the star of the crash clip @charlottenicdao, quoting a line from the show about going viral, because her not-real crash clip is really going viral... <End> pic.twitter.com/7CFVVSL5xV — Nathan Bazley (@NathanBazley) September 5, 2019

The internet is weird <a thread>



So the ABC released ep1 of an awesome vertical TV show called #CONTENTtvshow yesterday pic.twitter.com/luLOd3x3rT — Nathan Bazley (@NathanBazley) September 5, 2019

The show has been dubbed a “vertical video series” because it was filmed in a portrait ratio designed for a smartphone.

Co-directed by Daley Pearson, the executive producer of the smash-hit animated kids show Bluey, it was inspired by how much time Pearson spends on his phone.

“If I was to die and whatever god there was gave me stats on my life, I’m pretty sure I would be shocked to find out how much of the relationships with people I love the most were lived through phones,” he told Guardian Australia’s Luke Buckmaster.