Netflix's Trainwreck: Ranking All the Episodes From Worst Train Wreck to Best

Netflix's Trainwreck, a series of documentaries breaking down some of the wildest, most viral disasters of the past few decades, is — as the name suggests — hard to look away from. That's made it a big hit for Netflix in its first official season, following 2022's Trainwreck: Woodstock '99, with new episodes covering an infamous cruise ship feces fiasco, the deadly devastation at Travis Scott's Astroworld music festival, and the bonkers meme-driven Storm Area 51 event, among others. 

But not all episodes of Trainwreck are equal. As Trainwreck becomes a franchise that can run as long as people continue to go out of control and massive events remain mismanaged, the series is still trying to figure out what it wants to be and what defines a train wreck. Though we colloquially refer to some troubled human beings as train wrecks, do they make good subjects for Trainwreck? Or are the best train wrecks the events that spiral recklessly toward abandon, with the calamitous results becoming more famous than the event itself? Good news: I happen to be an expert on train wrecks, so I ranked all nine episodes of Trainwreck from worst (not trainwrecky enough) to best (the horror, the horror).   

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9. P.I. Moms

The penultimate episode of Trainwreck's first proper season looks under the hood of the almost-show P.I. Moms, a proposed Lifetime reality television series about a group of private investigators who also happen to be soccer moms, which was undone by behind-the-scenes shenanigans. This is an episode tied to a subject that deteriorates over time rather than collapses in spectacular and glorious schadenfreude. What makes P.I. Moms even worse is it's not only an episode about a television show that few people have ever heard of; it's about a show that never even made it to air, and the problems only affected a few people. Trainwreck is no place for the esoteric; the more familiar the subject, the better resonance it has with us.

And if we're being sticklers (which we are), the "train wreck" of P.I. Moms doesn't quite meet the minimum requirements of being a train wreck. P.I. Moms was sunk by allegations of scripted scenarios set up by its producer Chris Butler — What!? A reality show that isn't totally real? Stop the presses! — who also happened to be a dirty cop who resold seized drugs, set up DUIs by hiring women to get guys drunk before they got behind the wheel, and ran his own prostitution ring. But all of this brings attention to Butler and not to P.I. Moms, which was supposedly the real subject of the episode. P.I. Moms feels like a part of someone else's train wreck, when it should be the other way around.

8. Mayor of Mayhem

Former Toronto mayor Rob Ford is the subject of one of the worst episodes of Trainwreck, a rare total miss in the franchise. The biggest problem with the episode is that it focuses on a single person over years rather than building up to a spectacular implosion of a specific event, which is Trainwreck at its best. Instead, Mayor of Mayhem is mostly journalists recounting Ford's erratic behavior, which includes public drunkenness, his Trumpian disdain for the media, and the coup de grâce, video footage of Ford smoking crack cocaine with low-level gunrunners. 

Make no mistake: Ford was a train wreck. His rise to mayor was a train wreck. His time in office was a train wreck. But Netflix's Trainwreck excels when it uses sensationalism (for better or worse) to grab viewers' attention and then breaks down the steps that led to the disaster, while Ford's train wreck-iness would suit a traditional documentary better, which could examine his personal history and family life — something Mayor of Mayhem barely does at all — instead of skimming tabloid headlines. There's just no depth or lesson to Mayor of Mayhem, and that should be a lesson to further episodes of Trainwreck: Stick to particular scandals instead of an individual who requires a deeper dive. 

7. Balloon Boy

If you don't remember the Balloon Boy saga that gripped the nation on an October afternoon in 2009, then the anxious first 20 minutes of Trainwreck: Balloon Boy feel like they're setting the stage for one of the best episodes in the series. The Heene family, of Fort Collins, Colo., were an eccentric bunch led by weirdo inventor (and Wife Swap veteran) Richard Heene. One of Heene's latest inventions was a helium-powered model of a UFO, big enough to hoist a human passenger inside a makeshift cargo hold. And that's exactly what happened when 6-year-old Falcon Heene crawled inside and the restraints keeping the craft earthbound accidentally came undone, allowing physics to do the rest and send the vehicle thousands of feet into the air with its unwilling passenger inside. It sparked a breaking news story that was covered live by networks all across the country as everyone held their breath in hopes that the child would be safely returned. Well, that's what we all thought. 

At the 20-minute mark, Balloon Boy reveals that Falcon was actually at home and hiding in the garage's attic instead of on board the ship. With the fear of child mortality vanquished, the episode then focuses on the aftermath of the event and attempts to discover what really happened. That leads Balloon Boy to focus on the question of whether or not it was all a hoax perpetrated by the Heenes, using archival footage of news reports and current interviews with the Heenes, who deny jerking the chain of the American people. (Richard pled guilty to the hoax a month later, but says he was coerced into the plea under threat of his wife's deportation.) It's anticlimactic, and the rare episode of Trainwreck that leaves the truth up to the viewer to determine, something Trainwreck isn't properly equipped to handle.

6. The Cult of American Apparel

Trainwreck: The Cult of American Apparel introduces a new tactic to the series: creepiness. The episode probes the rise and fall of the clothing brand American Apparel, which rose to popularity in the late 2000s and early 2010s on the backs of controversial and exploitative advertisements predominantly featuring young women in suggestive poses and varying states of undress. It was all the brainchild of founder Dov Charney, who, after becoming the darling of a burgeoning fashion empire, was removed from his position after several accusations of sexual harassment and employee abuse. 

Charney's abhorrent actions have been previously well documented, knocking off a few points for The Cult of American Apparel, but the Netflix series gets some excellent access to former employees, who not only spill some tasty tea, but are also interesting subjects themselves. Like Mayor of Mayhem, the episode focuses on a single subject's bad behavior and would have been better as a traditional documentary to examine the complexity of what made Charney who he is, but the American Apparel story is meatier. Still, it feels more like familiar filler than a suitable example of what Trainwreck should be.

5. The Real Project X

The demarcation line between the good and bad episodes on this list falls between The Cult of American Apparel and The Real Project X. This episode is perfect Trainwreck material: A party invite goes viral on Facebook, resulting in 3,000 partygoers descending on a small town to cause mayhem. The problem? It was supposed to be a birthday gathering for a 16-year-old Dutch girl who never meant for the invite to be public. Merthe Weusthuis was excited to invite a few friends over to her house in the affluent suburb of Haren, the Netherlands, but forgot to toggle the post to private, leading to thousands of trolling RSVPs. After she deleted the post to stop a horde of morons from storming her house, another Facebook user copied it and included references to the 2012 American film Project X, in which a high schooler throws a massive party that spirals out of control. By the time he deleted the post, it was too late, and the party was being discussed all over the country by bored randoms looking to cause mayhem. 

The episode has everything you want from the series, including a critical mistake, the slow buildup to disaster, efforts to thwart the train wreck that were barreled over by the unstoppable forces of the internet, and fire. The total loss of control is palpable throughout the entirety of The Real Project X, like a train with its brakes cut as it hurtles towards a fireworks factory. There's a substantial amount of social commentary, too, including the dangers of social media and internet culture, which is perfectly on brand for Trainwreck.

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4. Poop Cruise

The most anticipated episode of the series was a largely successful movement, introducing a new tone for Trainwreck that fits the subject: gleeful mocking of others' non-fatal misfortune. The 2013 voyage of the Carnival Triumph cruise ship was supposed to a be a quick trip around the Gulf of Mexico but ended as a sh--stained floating prison where the feces flowed freely after a fire broke out, knocking out electricity and working toilets. The cruise had other issues, sure, like a lack of air conditioning, dwindling edible food after supplies quickly spoiled without refrigeration, and anger and panic among the 4,000-plus passengers trapped in a glorified outhouse, but everyone rightfully wants to talk about the poop. Passengers were asked to pee in the shower and defecate in bags, hallway carpets were soaked with a squishy liquid no one wants to remember, and one cruise chef unfortunately regaled us with a story of what he could only describe as "poop lasagna," as doo-doo was layered with toilet paper and on display for everyone to see. 

Even though it takes place on a boat, the subject of Poop Cruise is 100% a train wreck. The story gets worse and worse, and Trainwreck gets the goods from people who were actually on the boat and presumably have taken an ungodly number of showers since. Though Trainwreck broke onto the scene with stories about disasters that cost people their lives, Poop Cruise proves that the series can diversify into lighter topics with a tongue-in-cheek (and hands-over-nose) approach to horrifying experiences that survivors can look back on and laugh at. Sometimes, the right kind of subject can mask flaws in a documentary, and this is it.

3. Storm Area 51

Trainwreck has found a few formulas that work really well for the brand: concerts that end in preventable tragedy and viral internet memes that spiral out of control. The latter is on full display in Storm Area 51, which recounts the regretful 2019 movement of eternally online content creators and meme-swappers to bum-rush the mysterious military site Area 51 to uncover alleged secrets about aliens that the government is hiding from the public. Started as a joke by internet citizen Matty Roberts, the idea caught fire and became national news in the buildup to the event, with thousands pledging to show up. Promoters became involved to expand the event to an electronic music festival, major brands boarded the bandwagon and incorporated the event into advertising campaigns, the adult video web site Pornhub became a sponsor, residents of the small Nevada town expecting the crowd took legal action, and the military spent millions to prepare for a potential invasion of its top-secret facility. It was inescapable for a few weeks.

As the finale of the season, Storm Area 51 is a two-parter featuring good production and the series' trademark animation, resulting in one of the better Trainwreck episodes. Spotlighting a perfectly goofy subject that we can happily rubberneck at, it's also a nice palate cleanser to enter the offseason after the heaviness of Astroworld and The Cult of American Apparel. The compounding pressure on Roberts to shoot his shot at internet fame despite being nowhere near experienced enough to put together an event like this is exactly the FAFO catastrophe we want to watch in Trainwreck's lighter episodes, and the presence of military officers reminding us they were authorized to use lethal force to stop Naruto-running edgelords shows exactly how far things could have gone. In the end, the event fizzled out into a few hundred clout chasers showing up at the Area 51 security gate and posturing but not doing anything, while Roberts' EDM concert took place in nearby Las Vegas, but Storm Area 51 captures the absurdity of the idiots who gave this legs and the exhaustion of the innocent people who had to deal with them. 

2. The Astroworld Tragedy

As the season opener, The Astroworld Tragedy mined familiar territory — music events with tragic results — for viewers of the only earlier episode of Trainwreck, 2022's Trainwreck: Woodstock '99. In November 2021, rapper Travis Scott organized the third instance of Astroworld, his massive two-day music festival in Houston, Texas, which he headlined. On the day of the event, more than 50,000 people were expected to attend, but dreadful warning signs developed earlier in the day as fans without tickets stormed security gates and climbed fences to get in. As it was one of the first big post-COVID events in the area, attendees were more aggressive than usual, having been in lockdown for the majority of the previous 19 months. It was a powder keg ready to blow, and as Scott performed, the crowd surged forward, crushing attendees and killing 10 people. 

The Astroworld Tragedy is the most polished episode of Trainwreck to date, with high production values and minute-by-minute details of what happened, complete with friends of the victims who recounted everything that happened that night, and graphics showing the preventable flow of concertgoers that led to the crush and the negligence of festival organizers. It's a devastating documentary about mob mentality, corporate greed, and post-pandemic rage. But The Astroworld Tragedy is also Trainwreck's most sentimental episode, respecting the lives lost and catching up with the lifelong bond formed between one young man and the young woman who saved his life. 

1. Woodstock '99

The one that started it all is still tops. Trainwreck: Woodstock '99 — which was titled Clusterf**k: Woodstock '99 just weeks before its release until producers came around to the much better new name — is a visceral three-episode deconstruction of arguably the worst music festival experience ever. With testosterone-fueled bands and artists like Limp Bizkit, Metallica, and DMX headlining, the Woodstock ethos of freedom (minus the love part), and out-of-control drinking and drug consumption, Woodstock '99 became a riot with bands playing in the background, resulting in mass vandalism, several accounts of rape, and three deaths, all in the shadow of the capitalist system that allowed it to happen. 

Trainwreck: Woodstock '99 came out shortly after another documentary on Woodstock '99, HBO's Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage, but it quickly proved to be superior by using what we now know as Trainwreck hallmarks: emphasizing accounts from people who were entrenched there to tell the story from within rather than looking at it from 30,000 feet in the air. Woodstock '99 also serves as an excellent time capsule, capturing the feeling of an era in humankind and pop culture that we can all look back on and shake our heads at. And with more than 140 minutes of airtime, it's an incredibly detailed start to the series that's only rivaled by Astroworld and Area 51. 

The Trainwreck documentaries are now streaming on Netflix.