Netflix’s Fyre and Hulu’s Fyre Fraud come at the same topic in different ways. One is better.

“It’s a great time to be a con man in America.”

That’s the last line of Fyre Fraud, Hulu’s self-described “true crime comedy” about the disastrous, instantly infamous Fyre Festival that was supposed to take place in 2017. And it might as well be the documentary’s thesis too.

Well, actually, it might as well be the thesis of two documentaries about Fyre Festival, both of which are out in the same week on competing streaming services. Fyre, which premieres Friday on Netflix, was announced last December; directed by Chris Smith (Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond), it’s co-produced by Jerry Media, the company that also produced the viral promotional video for the Fyre Festival itself.

Rating for Hulu’s Fyre Fraud:

Rating for Netflix’s Fyre:

Remember Fyre Festival? It was supposed to be the greatest music festival of all time, a multi-day extravaganza on a private island in the Bahamas that was once owned by Pablo Escobar. The event was the brainchild of serial entrepreneur Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule; Blink-182 and Migos were going to perform alongside a bevy of other musicians, and the liquor would flow freely. Attendees would stay in lavishly equipped luxury tents or, for a lot more money, paradisiacal villas.

Thousands of people bought tickets.

But when attendees, some of whom had dropped thousands of dollars, arrived in April 2017, they were greeted by half-erected FEMA tents, no infrastructure, and mass chaos. And once word got out, Twitter loved it. As my Vox colleague Aja Romano wrote at the time, “for social media gawkers, Fyre Fest was a dream come true.”

Now the documentaries Fyre and Fyre Fraud are competing to explain how the Fyre Festival went so spectacularly wrong, and what happened in its aftermath.

Netflix set a review embargo for Fyre for Monday, January 14 — and at almost the exact moment the embargo lifted, Hulu dropped the previously unannounced Fyre Fraud, which is, at minimum, a pretty neat way to make sure that when people search for reviews of the Netflix movie, they instead find your actual movie, already available to watch. (It’s also a pretty clear shot across the bow in the streaming wars, and we can likely expect plenty more to come.)

Fyre Fraud and Fyre tackle the same material, but toward different ends

Once you see Fyre Fraud, directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, Hulu’s preemptive strike makes even more sense. The film is pointedly critical of Jerry Media and its role in Netflix’s documentary, even mentioning the rival film explicitly (the Jerry Media folks are “producing their own” film, someone notes).

People found out about Fyre Festival in late 2016, months before the festival was set to take place, because a bunch of the top Instagram models and influencers — people like Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid — posted about it on their feeds. The festival’s social media presence was designed and executed by Jerry Media, a hotshot company owned by Instagram influencer Elliot Tebele, a.k.a. FuckJerry, and included a viral video shot on the island where the festival was promised to take place (in reality, it wound up being on an island nearby).

Netflix

It is true that Jerry Media is a producer on Fyre but a little misleading to say the company “produced their own film”; Jerry Media is one of several executive producers of Netflix’s Fyre, which nonetheless feels even-handed and self-reflective. And Jerry Media figures appear in both Fyre and Fyre Fraud as interviewees.

Still, the Hulu film’s implication is clear: Jerry Media is acting unethically in (presumably) benefiting from whatever licensing fees Netflix paid for the film, when it played an instrumental role in marketing the Fyre Festival, along with its mastermind/master con artist Billy McFarland and Ja Rule, his business partner at the time.

Without Jerry Media, which orchestrated the festival’s considerable presence on social media, McFarland would have had a much harder time selling a basically nonexistent event to hundreds of people for thousands of dollars, defrauding not just them but also people who had been working for McFarland.

Fyre Fraud also has the benefit of an actual interview with McFarland, who is currently in federal prison after pleading guilty to two instances of wire fraud in connection with the botched festival. McFarland was paid by Fyre Fraud’s producers for his participation in an eight-hour interview as well as for providing some licensed footage included in the film.

In an interview about the as-yet-unreleased Fyre, director Smith told the Ringer’s Scott Tobias that his film was supposed to have a McFarland interview, but McFarland told him that the Hulu documentary’s producers had offered him $250,000 for an interview and footage and asked to be paid $125,000 to appear in Fyre. Fyre Fraud director Furst disputed the $250,000 figure, but confirmed to Tobias that McFarland was paid for the Hulu doc without disclosing the amount. Given McFarland’s demonstrated proclivity for lying for personal gain, it seems likely that he inflated the amount in an attempt to bargain Smith up.

In any case, Fyre Fraud has McFarland and Fyre does not. (The value of an interview with an alleged compulsive liar is up for debate.) There are also some overlapping interviews between the two films — including Seth Crossno, a Fyre Festival attendee who filed a lawsuit against McFarland with a friend and won $5 million in damages, and Calvin Wells, the guy behind the @FyreFraud Twitter account, who tried to expose what McFarland and co. were up to before the festival, with little success.

Hulu

The two films cover a lot of the same ground and use some of the same footage. Fyre Fraud tries to draw connections between what happened with Fyre Festival and larger cultural trends, like the existence of Instagram influencers and the phenomenon of FOMO, to which millennials are particularly susceptible, at least according to the documentary. (At times their methods, unfortunately, seem a bit slipshod.) It is, in essence, a think piece.

Fyre, meanwhile, feels more disciplined. It spends a bit less time trying to fill in all the backstory of the doomed event, preferring instead to recreate the mood around Fyre Festival’s inception, conflagration, and aftermath. It does a much better job of showing how people got suckered in, whether as employees of Fyre (which was also developing a talent-booking app at the time the festival was being planned), as partners or friends of McFarland’s, or as potential attendees.

Fyre does a better job of showing why people got sucked in

There’s a curious distinction between the two films: You actually come away from Netflix’s Fyre feeling like you’ve got a sense of who McFarland is and why he was able to con so many people into giving him their time, respect, and millions in cash. Hulu’s Fyre Fraud, in contrast, is oddly opaque about McFarland’s appeal, even though McFarland himself appears in the film.

Some of that comes from the nature of the interview itself. McFarland starts out answering each question he’s asked with fast, slick talk that will sound familiar to anyone who’s spent time around tech-bro types, who speak almost exclusively in euphemistic terms, as well as to anyone who’s read about the kinds of emails the Fyre team was sending out to disgruntled and frightened festival-goers who had arrived in the Bahamas expecting paradise and instead encountering FEMA tents and cheese sandwiches. (“The festival is being postponed until we can further assess if and when we are able to create the high-quality experience we envisioned.”)

He’s the kind of guy, in other words, who you can very easily imagine coming up with a ridiculous, impossible idea — like putting on a massive festival on a Bahamian island and pulling off the whole thing in the span of just a few months — and then agreeing with his buddies that they should just “do it and be legends.” It’s like a plot straight from Silicon Valley.

Netflix

Soon, though, McFarland seems stymied, and after a certain point, whenever he appears in Fyre Fraud, he looks sort of like he’s been socked in the stomach. He claims that the festival had in fact rented all the houses that attendees were promised but that he and his team “lost” the keys; when the interviewer asks him why he has never said that before, and why they didn’t just tell people that a long time ago, he can’t seem to muster an answer.

Fyre Fraud has the air of a “gotcha,” and truthfully, if anyone deserves to be gotcha’d, it’s probably Billy McFarland. (Both films are at pains to show that his serial “entrepreneurship” — before Fyre, he was the brains behind Magnises, an “exclusive” social club/credit card aimed at millennials that also ground to a halt — is little more than serial defrauding.)

But Fyre Fraud’s target seems less McFarland and more millennials, especially the ones who were foolish enough to get duped by him in the first place. Some of what’s said about the generation is genuinely insightful, particularly when New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino shows up as a commentator. But some of it feels like standard-issue millennial bashing when, in fact, part of McFarland’s success is predicated on the fact that he was able to trick a lot of older, wealthy people into sinking tons of money into his ventures as an “investment.” Yes, millennials got duped too. But there’s something else at play.

Schadenfreude powers the American fascination with grifters that makes both of these documentaries so intriguing

Both films spend time unpacking the schadenfreude-fueled glee that exploded across Twitter when the first tweets from desperate Fyre Festival attendees started going viral — everyone who watched the drama unfold, as several people point out, loved seeing rich, spoiled millennials get their comeuppance.

But Hulu’s Fyre Festival seems at times to be fueled by a similar feeling of delight in its subject’s downfall. (Hence the “true crime comedy” description.)

Netflix’s Fyre, in contrast, really feels like a tragedy. The film mostly steers away from broad cultural strokes, focusing more on the ways McFarland’s actions affected the people around him. People talk about how they were suckered in, why they trusted him, why he seemed like he could be a visionary. You can see, briefly, why McFarland was appealing. You might even start to empathize.

That makes the letdown less comical and more disturbingly personal. One of the film’s most heart-wrenching moments is when Andy King, an experienced events producer trying to salvage Fyre Festival even as he can tell it’s bound to be a catastrophe, gets a call from McFarland — someone he’d worked with for years — asking King to “take one for the team” and go give a customs officer a blow job in order to convince him to release bottled water that the team hadn’t planned to pay for.

Netflix

And he went to do it. You can see the disbelief in King’s eyes as he tells the story; he was so deep into the mess, and had believed so much in McFarland, that he still thought it could be fixed, and that he should, reasonably, give someone a blow job to save the whole thing.

That same kind of devastation shows up in the stories of several Bahamians who lost savings, credibility, time, and more because of McFarland’s scheme. When Fyre Festival went awry, it wasn’t just rich millennials, a bunch of mostly white trust fund kids (and less wealthy ones), who got stiffed by one of their own. It was people with far more to lose, many of whom may never be able to recover.

Those stories are present in Fyre Fraud as well, but they feel especially potent in Fyre because the film is structured around them and is pointedly aimed at making us understand: Something like this could have happened to any of us.

And that also helps sort out why McFarland and the whole Fyre debacle is a subject of such unending fascination, enough to light the internet on fire for a while and to sustain two documentaries about what happened coming out the same week.

In many ways, the archetypal grifter or con artist, someone who takes advantage of the rich or at least well-off by posing as something they are not, is as American as apple pie. Grifters and con artists appeal to a particularly American image of success and sense of optimism about the future. (The fourth episode of the excellent podcast The Dream, about multilevel marketing companies, shows how the power of positive thinking, combined with the American idea that we ought to be able to amass wealth if we just try hard enough, birthed pyramid schemes and, eventually, MLMs — which may just be a kind of grift particularly aimed at middle-class housewives.)

The dueling docs unveil something essential, and icky, about the year of the grifter

In the past year or two, people like Anna Delvey, Elizabeth Holmes, the guy who pretended to be a British expert on royalty but was actually some dude from Albany, and, yes, Billy McFarland captured our imagination. (In some quarters, 2018 was even labeled the “year of the grifter.”) And as a recent series at New York’s Metrograph movie theater attested, Hollywood has been fascinated with con artists and grifters for a long time.

I think the grifter archetype is cousin to the celebrity outlaw, another figure long mythologized both by media reports and by Hollywood: Think of Jesse James, Butch Cassidy, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson. They were the subjects of ballads and breathless newspaper stories in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, folk heroes to millions who rooted for them even when they were violent and ruthless — quintessential American antiheroes.

Why root for those who rob? You could look to Robin Hood for answers, but you’d only get so far; Robin Hood, at least, was turning around and giving away what he stole. Celebrity outlaws and celebrity grifters keep it all for themselves.

The answer, it seems, is that we love these people because they create stories in which we can experience acute schadenfreude. The celebrity outlaw stole from banks insured by the government, which meant they were sticking it to the man. We hate the man. Hurrah! Celebrity grifters manage to con wealthy people out of their wealth. Eat the rich! Hurrah!

Hulu

In both cases, they rely on their wits; they’re just ballsy enough to make their schemes work, and more ballsy or clever than us, the schmucks who still work hard to earn our money the old-fashioned way.

And yes, this strategy will be familiar to anyone who’s observed President Donald Trump, whose history of cons and grifts is well-documented (The Dream also points to his history of profiting from marketing MLM schemes). He seems to surround himself with con men too; my personal favorite is former Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt, whom the Ringer crowned the “grifter king.” For many, the appeal of Trump is that he appears to stick it to whoever it is they don’t like, a reputation that has helped him get ahead for decades.

And so the schadenfreude that powered the jubilation over the Fyre Festival meltdown — as fun as it all was — has its ickier sides, mostly because the rejoicing over whoever got what was coming to them has tended to crowd out those who couldn’t afford to get hurt but did anyhow. That’s not really a millennial thing. Americans rooted for John Dillinger even when he killed innocent people, and got excited when “rich millennials” and Instagram influencers got conned by Billy McFarland. Hulu’s Fyre Fraud leans into that instinct and revels in their downfall. What Netflix’s Fyre does especially well is remind us that there’s not really anything funny about it.

Fyre Fraud is streaming on Hulu. Fyre premieres on Netflix on January 18.

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