Television
The Netflix documentary series Trainwreck revisits catastrophes both tragic and comic with an overarching lens on the enduring characteristics of human behaviour. By Sarah Krasnostein.
Trainwreck
“Men, it has well been said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one,” wrote journalist Charles Mackay in his early study of group psychology, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
First published in 1841, Mackay’s book – which remains in print – is a miscellany of human folly, from economic bubbles to religious zealotry to fortune-telling. While Mackay acknowledged that some of the terrain “may be familiar to the reader”, he aimed to render it with “sufficient novelty of detail” to shed new and startling light on our wide-ranging capacity for unreason.
That’s also the mission of Trainwreck, the Netflix-produced anthology documentary series that recently dropped eight new episodes.
Billed as “revisit[ing] some of the most gripping, bizarre – and sometimes even horrifying – events” that once dominated the headlines, Trainwreck is a modern miscellany of ways we have overestimated our rationality and civility, resulting, as one talking head puts it, in “clusterfucks of the highest order”.
The original three-episode production, released in 2022, focused exclusively on the ill-fated Woodstock ’99 festival, framing it as a story of capitalist greed, criminal negligence and white male entitlement. Its admirable tonal balance – between ’90s nostalgia, historical documentary, chaotic spectacle and human pathos – accounted for its popularity.
Three years later, the move to anthologise and extend the inquiry into other avoidable disasters, as well as media hoaxes and scandals both corporate and political, mostly achieves the same success. Each of the new instalments has a different director and deftly captures the zeitgeist of its times while emphasising enduring characteristics of human behaviour.
Evoking, for Aussies of a certain age, Corey Worthington’s 15 seconds of fame, The Real Project X tells the story of the full-blown riot that ensued in 2012 after a teenager in a quiet Dutch town inadvertently made the Facebook invitation to her birthday party public, drawing thousands of people to her front door. As in Woodstock ’99, a quietly escalating sense of dread turns what might at first appear absurdly amusing into an intimate and disturbing account of the horrors of mob violence.
The madness of that animal known as the crowd is also the subject of The Astroworld Tragedy. Directed by Yemi Bamiro and Hannah Poulter, it traces another avoidable catastrophe – the deaths of 10 young people, and the injury of hundreds, in a crowd crush at one of the first post-Covid music festivals. “This was a case of ignoring blaring warning sirens,” an expert in crowd safety says of the event design. “I was shocked … by what I found.”
Mayor of Mayhem, directed by Shianne Brown, explores the deranged tenure of populist Toronto mayor Rob Ford, who, for a time, seemed to be made of Teflon. Though he died the year Donald Trump rose to power, Ford could’ve written the first draft of the president’s rule book. In between smoking crack with gun runners, Ford disparaged the media trying to hold him to account.
Tone is again interesting here – Ford is presented as odious without being dehumanised. “I want to present the complex man behind the headlines,” Brown told Toronto Life – “a lot of us have a Rob in our lives”. While Ford gave the cameras sufficient material to fill a longer documentary, the narrative pans out just enough to make a point about the rise of modern media and the fall of the civil state.
The Cult of American Apparel, directed by Sally Rose Griffiths, is as sleek as a pair of spandex leggings. It follows that company’s meteoric mid-2000s rise and spectacular demise through the recollections of its still shell-shocked employees. Humour is balanced with horror as they reflect on coming to consciousness about the “charismatic” chief executive and founder, Dov Charney, who, for a time, dictated the rules of cool and trumpeted ethical manufacturing while maintaining an unbelievably toxic work environment.
Which brings us to Poop Cruise, about that time in 2013 when 4000 people found themselves stranded in the Gulf of Mexico aboard Carnival Triumph without lights, wi-fi or plumbing. What began as a two-day pleasure cruise rapidly devolved into a latter-day version of Lord of the Flies, but with more raw sewage. And yet, through the frank recollections of former passengers and crew members – and the trajectory of the relationships they forged through the shared experience – Poop Cruise becomes more than a revolting spectacle. If you have the stomach to get there, it concludes with startling effectiveness as a triumphant testament to the human spirit.
It is also, like all the episodes, gorgeously filmed. Fleeting human emotion is caught flickering across faces and crowds. In drone shots across the series, the camera’s cleanly abstracting eye regularly reduces human life on Earth to pure form and colour: the boat, the road, the house, the suburb, the city. The effect is to invite us, from that displacing remove, to think again about what we’ve done with our powers.
This is most effectively realised in the final instalment, Storm Area 51. Billed as “the story of the greatest shitpost ever made”, it explores what happened when a 20-year-old vape salesman’s 2am Facebook post – playfully wishing to see what ufological mysteries the United States military may be guarding – went viral. More than 3.5 million people united virtually over a plan to storm a heavily guarded air force facility in the Nevada desert.
Most of the new instalments run a bingeable length of about an hour each, but the scope of the material in Storm Area 51 earns it two episodes. While it reinforces previous instalments’ concerns with cultish thinking and the instability of group behaviour, it uses that extra time to expand on the perverse misuse we’ve made of our online connectedness. And it ends on an unexpectedly humbling and adorable note.
Overall, Trainwreck’s tone succeeds – a trademark blend of pathos and factual rigour with a playfully sardonic sensibility. Its access to self-reflective firsthand witnesses is admirable. The B-roll footage of those witnesses re-enacting moments from their stories is a documentarian’s dream. For the most part, it elevates a technique that seemed doomed to remain in Unsolved Mysteries territory. However, that approach to still-grieving survivors of the Astroworld tragedy is misjudged and diminishes an otherwise compelling narrative.
Despite the name of the series, prurience is mostly not the point nor the product of Trainwreck. What saves it from being disaster porn is the way in which it rehumanises viral moments that are remembered – if at all – as parody or caricature. Though the bizarre, the devastating and the disgusting ostensibly dominate its subject selection, at the centre of each episode is a worthy topic for further reflection – something that is in the public interest as well as interesting to the public.
Whether exploring our limitless tolerance for flagrant abuses of corporate and political power, our credulity for mis- and disinformation, the speed with which we turned the internet into a weapon of mass destruction or the cannibalism of the crowd, the intimate, first-person testimonies bear out Mackay’s observation of herd madness and solitary reawakening.
Ken Burns is unlikely to tackle such topics as the Poop Cruise or the 2009 Balloon Boy fiasco. But he did say that documentarians are called to find themselves in the other. Trainwreck evokes that empathy in its unexpected explorations of group dynamics and personal consequences as well as enduring human foibles. Its various directors share a fine eye for capturing individual singularity in all its glory, constantly conveying the unique nature and weight of another’s experience.
Mackay’s weighty tome ran to more than 600 pages and still it was too short to cover the ground of our collective delusions, follies, imitativeness and wrongheadedness. “Popular delusions began so early, spread so widely, and have lasted so long, that instead of two or three volumes, fifty would scarcely suffice to detail their history,” he wrote. Which is good news for Trainwreck’s fans because, in continuing Mackay’s mission of demonstrating that the arc of human history doesn’t bend towards progress, there is no danger of the series running out of material any time soon.
Trainwreck is streaming on Netflix.
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This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 9, 2025 as "Horror shows".
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