Trials by Fyre: A Review of Netflix and Hulu’s Fyre Festival Documentaries

In April 2017, no one could scroll through their Instagram and Twitter feeds without seeing a post advertising Fyre Festival — a music festival to be located on “Pablo Escobar’s private island.”

The event was promoted by top models like Hailey Baldwin and Bella Hadid and artists including Blink-182 and Major Lazer were scheduled to headline. However, by the end of April when the festival was about to occur, it seemed the Fyre Festival wasn’t the burning sensation it was advertised to be. Festival goers arrived at the festival only to discover that their expectations of luxury penthouses and gourmet meals were far from the truth.

Pictures of white hurricane disaster relief tents, thousands of festival goers riding on yellow school buses and eating sandwiches consisting of bread and one slice of cheddar filled the news. Almost two years after the disastrous festival, Netflix and Hulu released rivaling documentaries about the event just four days apart. Read below to see how the two documentaries compare.

FYRE FRAUD

Hulu was the first to release their documentary, called “Fyre Fraud” on Jan. 14. The documentary has one key thing that Netflix does not — Billy McFarland.

McFarland was a previously failed businessman and the mind behind Fyre, and ultimately the reason it flopped.  

Hulu was able to get an interview with McFarland, but only by paying him. Despite the ethical red flags over McFarland’s payout, I found that the interview was a crucial point of the story that Netflix didn’t include. Although there was more footage included of McFarland shifting around uncomfortably in his chair than actually answering questions, it helped me understand him as a person — a pathological liar who refused take ownership for any of the festival’s mistakes.

McFarland’s answers about his original plan and motives for the festival, including hundreds of luxury penthouses and celebrities, taught me about his life and business ventures before the festival, and his ultimate downfall after it. This made it clear that for McFarland, lying came as naturally as talking. Throughout his past, he had seemingly been scamming others around him, beginning when he hacked his elementary school’s system to tell his classmates he would fix their broken crayons for a dollar.

Although neither documentary can fully explain McFarland’s lying and scamming behavior, Hulu does a better job. They look into McFarland’s childhood and life before the festival, displaying his earlier business ventures, including Magnises, his first company, where he created credit cards out of black steel. Although it didn’t go up in flames like Fyre Festival, the company ended up failing after only a couple of years.

McFarland is where Hulu’s edge over Netflix ends. Although he is an important part of the story, that’s in no way where the story ends. Hulu spends too long on McFarland, and not enough time on about everything else.

What about those horrible tents? Who sold the cheese on bread combo?

The documentary skips the most talked about events in the story and wastes its time with flashy graphics and editing.

I don’t mind some back story, but Hulu wasted almost 30 minutes before getting to the actual story. This time wasn’t spent filling me in on the background of the festival or describing what was happening at the festival site. This time was dedicated to spitting out useless facts about the number of millennials and playing GIFS that are betting staying in iMessage.

The lack of information about the actual festival and surplus of tawdry editing is what caused Hulu’s documentary to fall flat. Compared to Netflix’s clean cut approach, “Fyre Fraud” looks as if it was edited by someone who just discovered how to add effects on Google Slides.

Every time the overload of irrelevant information slowed down, the directors threw in a colorful video in a desperate attempt to win back my attention. Although it did cause me to look away from my game of Candy Crush, it made the entire documentary seem thrown together.

FYRE: THE GREATEST PARTY THAT NEVER HAPPENED

Opening with the planning of the festival, Netflix’s “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened” gets right into what it knows people are watching for and doesn’t stray from it.

Although it has some backstory to McFarland’s past ventures, the majority of the film is dedicated to build-up of the festival and what caused it to turn from an A-lister party into a hoax.

It seemed that Netflix came into the documentary with a clear view of what they wanted it to convey, and were able to execute it better than Hulu. The documentary was, for the most part, interesting throughout its entirety — the only time I found myself scrolling through Instagram was when I was trying to find the festival’s profile.

“Fyre” gives the viewer a real look into the festival, including interviews with bookers, event planners, strategists, marketing directors, even the Bahamian workers involved in the creation of the festival. It gave me a better idea of how real people were affected by the festival — not just the VIP celebrities who could ride their private jets home. If someone was working under McFarland in the planning of the festival, Netflix managed to include them.

A piece of information that Netflix highlighted is how many people warned McFarland not to host the festival. Everyone from the social media director to the Bahamian construction workers voiced their concern about the arrangement after realizing the festival could not be completed in a time frame of only four months that McFarland wanted. A festival project the size of Fyre would have taken 18 months to fully execute.  It helped me realize just how frantic and unplanned the entire process of trying to create the festival was.

Nearly everyone interviewed in the documentary had a personal attachment to the failure of the festival. They spent months scrambling to plan, promote or book the event, all while warning McFarland not to host it. And now, they’re pissed.

Thanks to their anger with McFarland, they didn’t hold back from sharing all the disturbing details of the festival. They tell of McFarland and his team selling penthouses that didn’t exist, bribing festival workers and spending millions of dollars on alcohol.

Netflix makes it much easier to understand the failure of the Fyre Festival. It truly demonstrates McFarland and the rest of the team’s ability to pull in individuals and interest them in the event. Promotional videos with influencers from Ja Rule to Kendall Jenner were purposefully made to seem as if everyone Instagram personality would be attending the festival.

“Fyre”’s presentation of facts makes it clearer to see how willing people would be to drop hundreds of thousands of dollars to escape to a private island for a weekend of luxury.

But it’s not all perfect.

The documentary was directed by Jerry Media, who helped promote the festival. In Hulu’s documentary, Jerry Media’s involvement is heavily featured, including how he continued to promote the festival even when it was clear it was not going to happen as planned, raising a question as to what other facts were not included in the Netflix documentary.

Even with this ethical hiccup, I felt that Netflix’s “Fyre” was an altogether cleaner and more interesting documentary.

WHICH TO WATCH?

Which one to watch? If you’ve got three hours and a long attention span, I would say both. Both documentaries bring up interesting points and together help to explain the entire story. However, if you have a geometry test and English paper due tomorrow, go with Netflix’s “Fyre: The Biggest Party That Never Happened”. It’ll give you the basic facts to spark your interest in Fyre — pun intended.