Fyre Festival was perhaps the most epic failure in the music festival industry. The festival, planned on an island in the Bahamas, continuously changed plans, ran on funds that didn’t exist and was completely overbooked. People were showing up to a festival just to be let down with nowhere to stay and no way to get home.
It has been talked about by many news platforms, countless social media threads and celebrities who apologized for their involvement. Fyre Festival generated so much buzz that Netflix and Hulu both made different documentaries about the event to expose the true stories leading up to the failure.
When deciding which platform’s documentary to stream, Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened documentary is by far the better option.
The Netflix documentation of Fyre Festival is organized in a much more interesting way than Hulu’s. From the moment the documentary started, the audience was captivated by statements from prominent sources and video clips from the models and Fyre Festival team. Similarly, the film’s organization starts with Billy McFarland, the mastermind behind the operation, being bombarded with questions from the media. That is parallelled after the story of the festival is finished when the same clip is shown to explain the consequences of the festival.
Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened also includes a more interesting collection of stories that better depicted the chaotic and jaw-dropping events that led up to and took place at Fyre Festival. The sourcing is more telling and exposing for the reality of the situation, and the tone reflects the seriousness of the actions.
On the other hand, the Hulu version, Fyre Fraud, is not captivating. The story more closely follows McFarland and his triumphs in entrepreneurship prior to Fyre Festival, which seem to be painting him in a sympathetic lens. This was a major turn-off because McFarland was not compliant with admitting his mistakes regarding Fyre Festival, and he doesn’t deserve sympathy from the audience.
Fyre Fraud also uses weird imagery, video clips and music that make the documentary less serious. There are clips from television shows, music that doesn’t match the tone of the situation, and imagery that is just awkwardly placed and disrupts the flow. The reality is that Fyre Festival was a serious failure that sparked lawsuit after lawsuit, and a lot of people were really upset by the situation. That’s not to mention the reputations that were hurt from endorsement, like the models who promoted the event and had to retract their statements with apologies.
The biggest similarity between the two documentaries was the sourcing. There are multiple video clips of comments from the festivalgoers that are used in both documentaries, and some of the main sources from the Netflix version are featured in the Hulu version as well.
The biggest difference between the two documentaries is the portrayal of the situation and how they contextualize McFarland. Netflix is much more serious in exposing the realities of the festival and of what McFarland was guilty of, whereas Hulu uses McFarland as one of their main sources, giving him a chance to explain himself. Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened has a much more powerful and serious tone, whereas Fyre Fraud feeds into McFarland and makes it more of a funny, relatable documentary with bits and clips to explain thoughts or points.
When choosing which documentary about Fyre Festival to watch, Netflix’s Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened is the clear choice. It deeply explains the reality of Fyre Festival and what people really had to go through, and it makes the point without relying on tongue-in-cheek photos and video clips, like Fyre Fraud does, to get the point across.
The better exposé is Netflix’s by a landslide.
