Which Fyre Festival Documentary Should You Watch: Hulu or Netflix?

The dueling Fyre Festival documentaries are finally here, and in a dramatic turn of events befitting the subject matter (by which we mean it’s very 2019), Hulu surprise dropped Fyre Fraud four days before Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened was supposed to air on Netflix. Suddenly, the Fyre films themselves turned into a fight for coveted content exclusivity or a meta-commentary on how influence and clout function in the attention economy commanded by social media. And more importantly, what is a modern millennial culture vulture to do? After all, there are only so many hours in the day to catch up on the 2017 fiasco in the Bahamas that became the influencer-cum-grifter scandal of the century. And so, Vogue is here to tell you which one deserves your time and why. (In a twist that you might have seen coming, not unlike the morning rainstorm that fatefully dealt Fyre Festival its final blow, yes, there are reasons to watch both.)

Read on to figure out which Fyre Fest chronicle you should dive into this week:

How are Hulu’s Fyre Fraud and Netflix’s Fyre different?

Hulu’s documentary features interviews with Billy McFarland himself, the man behind the festival (now serving 6 years in prison for fraud), as well as with his model girlfriend. That’s probably the biggest difference between Fyre Fraud and Netflix’s documentary, though the latter has its own insiders: primarily the team behind FuckJerry and Jerry Media, the meme-makers and marketing company that masterminded the viral Fyre rollout. Fyre is edited from hours of behind-the-scenes content recorded by the Fyre team, Jerry Media, and from Matte Projects, the marketers who made the model-filled Fyre promo videos in the Bahamas that made everyone buy tickets in the first place. Also, the Netflix doc is directed by Chris Smith of Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond and American Movie, while the Hulu documentary was directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, and backed by a group including Mic. Fyre is more atmospheric and cinematic than Fyre Fraud, which has more meta-analysis and outsider commentary (for example, from New Yorker critic Jia Tolentino) on what Fyre means in our current economic and sociopolitical moment.

That Hulu has McFarland and Netflix has FuckJerry are facts that each party has used to malign the other’s ethical credibility on their projects. Smith told The Ringer that they refused to pay McFarland, like Hulu did, and thus, did not get his sit-down. “We were aware of [the Hulu production] because we were supposed to film Billy McFarland for an interview,” Smith said. “He told us that they were offering $250,000 for an interview. He asked us if we would pay him $125,000. And after spending time with so many people who had such a negative impact on their lives from their experience on Fyre, it felt particularly wrong to us for him to be benefiting. It was a difficult decision, but we had to walk away for that reason. So then he came back and asked if we would do it for $100,000 in cash. And we still said this wasn’t something that was going to work for us.” (Furst confirmed to The Ringer that his production had paid McFarland but insists it was a far smaller amount than $250,000.)

Meanwhile, Fyre Fraud directly calls out Fyre for collaborating with the Jerry Media team (which is named in a Fyre-related lawsuit) as producers; Fyre Fraud has the perspective of a former Jerry Media associate who has since defected from the group. “I feel like there’s a bigger, ethically compromised position, and that’s going and partnering with folks who marketed the Fyre Festival and were well-aware that this was not going to happen as planned,” Furst said to The Ringer. “That folks were not going to get villas, that folks were not even going to get bathrooms. We have emails that prove that people knew months in advance what was going on, and we have a whistle-blower from inside that social media company [Jerry] who says that he knew months before that this wasn’t going to be what it was sold as . . . It’s a little bit of a head-scratcher to say that we have an ethical quandary when it seems like people who got the rest of the world knee-deep in shit are making large licensing fees and getting prestige when this thing comes out on Friday. To me, I think it’s a little bit of the pot calling the kettle black.”

How are Hulu’s Fyre Fraud and Netflix’s Fyre similar?

Fyre firefight aside, there are significant overlaps between the projects. Notably, they use a lot of the same footage around Billy McFarland’s rise as a millennial entrepreneur (namely, the same local New Jersey cable news segment) as well as commentary from some of the same influencers who attended Fyre Festival including Seth Crossno, a blogger who documented the disaster, and Calvin Wells, a pre-festival whistle-blower and New York financier who ran the FyreFestivalFraud Twitter account. Both documentaries have interviews with Bahamians who worked with the Fyre team, and neither one was able to get interviews with Ja Rule.

Should you watch Netflix’s Fyre?

If you’re less familiar with the whole Fyre debacle, the Netflix option might be for you. It’s taut and tension-filled, and provides more of a chronological dissection of McFarland’s machinations, as well as how the festival and its varied employees and investors fell under his sway. Additionally, the insider footage from the Fyre team is fascinating, including mind-boggling post-festival footage commissioned by McFarland, out of jail on bail, recorded while he was once again attempting to commit fraud (this time through a third party, through a familiar scam of selling phony tickets to everything from nonexistent Taylor Swift meet and greets to the Met Gala). Netflix’s project also has a few more testimonials and personal footage from lower-level Fyre Fest customers (not famous people or influencers), so there’s more of a visceral sense of what it was like. All the behind-the-scenes information from those closest to McFarland helps illustrate how regular people were duped into following his madness and delusion, and paints a picture of the real-life devastation (not to mention unpaid bills on his employees’ personal credit cards) he left in his wake. A set of final comments from the restauranteur who spent her own savings to cover the catering for the stranded Fyre attendees is particularly wrenching.

Should you watch Hulu’s Fyre Fraud?

Hulu’s film offers a broader vision of how Fyre Fest fits into social media, consumption, and economic trends, and provides some much-needed nuance to a story that can skew cartoonish. McFarland’s cooperation means that he comes off as less of a sociopath and more a symptom of the attention economy, in which people are eager to make money off of nebulous, unverified value systems based on likes and retweets rather than real labor or quality. The Jerry Media team, as well as Matte Projects, are more critically indicted here than in Fyre for their enabling of McFarland’s grift. Fyre Fraud feels like it came from outside the influencer ecosystem more than the Netflix documentary does but, for that reason, it also doesn’t feel as juicy. Consider it a valuably intelligent contribution to the grifter discourse.