What I'm Watching

This is a thread to share all the good things you're watching at the moment, or have recently watched. Serialized shows on broadcast or streaming; films; digital shorts; stand-up; documentaries; performances — whatever! Tell us what you're watching and enjoying these days.

Well, as has been extensively documented in this space, I am an aficionado of garbage television, so OBVIOUSLY I have watched both documentaries on the explosive shitshow that was the Fyre Festival.

(One is on Netflix and one is on Hulu. They are both terrible and amazing.)

image of a middle-aged white man with greying hair wearing a sweater and collared shirt, sitting in a wood-paneled room being interviewed, making a WTF face
This guy tho.

Naturally, I found the overarching story of a vibrating con man who defrauded many people out of much money to be very compelling, but what I found even more intriguing was how many people working with him knew they were helping him commit an elaborate fraud but just kept plowing ahead anyway, some of them apparently deluding themselves that if they just worked hard enough it would all come together and they'd all be legends.

And then there's this: One of the themes running through both of the docs is that the social media marketing of the Fyre Festival was so irresistible that it's understandable people would quit their jobs and sell all of their stuff to attend a music festival, or just plop down tens of thousands of dollars of their own (or their parents') money to "be a part of history," despite having not even the most basic information, like how they're going to actually get to the supposedly deserted island on which the festival was being held.

No social media marketing is so good that it could convince me that partying with Instagram models while listening to Ja Rule on an island owned by a murderer is the opportunity of a lifetime.

I'm not saying that the people who bought into this mess deserved to be defrauded, and I took no joy in watching them be disappointed and confused and ultimately trapped, albeit briefly. I'm just saying that they should really question why the fuck the Fyre Festival looked like something "important" to them in the first place.

Anyway! What are you watching these days?

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