Hulu Surprise-Debuts Fyre Festival Documentary Fyre Fraud

The feature-length "true-crime comedy" is now streaming

By Scott Russell  |  January 14, 2019 | 11:37am
Image via Hulu
Music News Fyre Festival
Hulu Surprise-Debuts Fyre Festival Documentary Fyre Fraud

Hulu has surprise-debuted Fyre Fraud, a feature-length original documentary that performs a post-mortem on 2017’s infamous Fyre Festival. The doc’s unannounced release comes just days before the Jan. 18 debut of FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, Netflix’s less snappily titled answer to the question, “What in the hell went wrong with Fyre Festival?” (Answer: Just about everything.)

Today’s (Jan. 14) new Hulu documentary boasts exclusive interviews with Billy McFarland, the since-incarcerated organizer behind the fest’s tremendous failure and fraudulence. Allow the streamer’s synopsis to elaborate:

The Fyre Festival was the defining scam of the millennial generation, at the nexus of social media influence, late-stage capitalism and morality in the post-truth era. Marketing for the 2017 music event went viral with the help of rapper Ja Rule, Instagram stars, and models, but turned epic fail after stranding thousands in the Bahamas. Featuring an exclusive interview with Billy McFarland, the convicted con-man behind the festival; Fyre Fraud is a true-crime comedy bolstered by a cast of whistleblowers, victims and insiders going beyond the spectacle to uncover the power of FOMO and an ecosystem of enablers, driven by profit and a lack of accountability in the digital age.

Fyre Fraud comes to us from Emmy-nominated, Peabody Award-winning directors Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, who also executive produce alongside Michael Gasparro, The Cinemart, MIC and Billboard.

“Fyre Fraud is more than the story of a failed music festival in the Bahamas—this dark comedy is a cautionary tale for a generation,” Furst and Nason say in a statement. “Billy McFarland offers us a window into the mind of a con artist, the insidious charm of the fraudster and how they can capture our imaginations, our investment and our votes in the age of Trump. McFarland’s staggering ambition metastasized in a petri dish of late-stage capitalism, corporate greed and predatory branding, all weaponized by our fear of missing out.”

“Our aim was to set the stage for a strange journey into the moral abyss of our digital age, going beyond the meme to show an ecosystem of enablers, driven by profit and willing to look the other way, for their own gain,” the duo continue. “We draw on countless cultural references, on true crime tension, and on humor—but we did not intend to create a toothless comedy about the Fyre Festival. We hope this film can pierce our collective apathy and disrupt our own millennial peers, if only for an instant—to look at these stories for what they truly are, and to halt this algorithm before it devours us whole.”

Hulu’s Fyre Fest documentary was first revealed in an April THR report, though the project was described then as an “investigative docuseries.” No release date was announced at the time.

Watch the Fyre Fraud trailer below. The 96-minute doc is now streaming on Hulu.

 
Join the discussion...