Anybody with an internet connection and an active social media account knows about the grandiose and hilarious tragedy of Fyre Festival, a proposed luxury music festival that was set to take place over two weekends in spring 2017 on the Bahamian Island of Great Exuma. What was pitched to be an unbelievable weekend of endless partying amongst supermodels and celebrities turned out to be a millennial “Lord of the Flies” playing out in real time over Twitter to the entertainment of millions.

It was a disastrous event unlike anything to come before it and immediately set a standard for just what kind of disaster can come out of the age of mass social media marketing and an image-obsessed culture. It is a narrative that is ripe for the picking of Hollywood with the CEO of the fest and Fyre Media, Billy McFarland, inadvertently posing himself as a cartoonishly douchey fraudster a la Leonardo DiCaprio’s take on Jordan Belfort in “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

ANNALISA BARANOWSKI | THE DEPAULIA

However, streaming giants Netflix and Hulu beat big Hollywood studios to the punch in telling this story to the masses in the form of two very similar documentaries. Netflix delivered Chris Smith’s “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened” on Jan. 18, with Hulu cutting them in line on the 14th with Jenner Furst’s and Julia Willoughby Nason’s “Fyre Fraud.” The mere releasing of these documentaries caused waves on social media, with Hulu doing a big surprise release four days after Netflix dropped their release announcement trailer. The tension was clear and the two documentaries officially become competitors. And they have every reason to be competitors because, as it turns out, there is not much that necessarily differentiates these two.

Both docs cover the same basic ground: the rise of McFarland as a socially awkward, uber-smart entrepreneur with companies like Fyre and Magnises. He then went on to conceptualize Fyre Fest and brilliantly market it to his wealthy, vulnerable social media-leaching millennial crowd. Both documentaries pose this as rather procedural, but it starts to get really interesting when things fall apart and all of McFarland’s grand, empty promises collapse in on themselves. We hear perspectives from all around, from those who attended the event, to those who worked it and suffered the most, to those who even helped McFarland create the event who now seem to professionally cover their own asses.

Both documentaries are highly amusing to watch, but they both fail to deliver much in the way of a message or depth. One thing that sets the Hulu doc apart from the Netflix one is that “Fraud” gets an actually sitting interview with McFarland (for a controversially high but undisclosed amount of money), who smugly sits there and delivers nothing of merit. It’s infuriating and almost totally pointless.

There is a lot on the mind of both of these films: the millenial fear of missing out on every big moment, the ever-growing black hole of empathy at the core of social media and how the world still keeps seeing the Billy McFarlands of the world get big swing opportunities like this. After watching both films back-to-back last weekend, I can disappointedly say that both films left me completely cold on all those subjects. Even the internet isn’t doing what it always does, which is to pit things against one another. The consensus around these two films is a resounding meh. They lit the world on fire for about a solid week, but not the way the chaotic event that inspired them did. “Fyre” and “Fyre Fraud’ will more than likely fade into the ether to be forgotten.  One can only hope that society does the same to McFarland.