Netflix’s “reimagining” of the infamous 1971 study is aimless, contradictory, and inherently encumbered by its existence as a TV show.
Photo: Netflix
Spoilers follow forThe New Stanford Prison Experiment.
Much like watching The Traitorshas convinced me that we should abolish juries because people are far too confident in their incorrect interpretations of others’ behavior, The New Stanford Prison Experimenthas affirmed my belief that we have simply run out of original television ideas. In 1971, Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo conducted a study in which a group of participants were divided into prison guards and inmates, with the guards given nearly unchecked power. The ethically messy experiment lasted less than a week, but the volunteer guards’ rapid tumble into cruelty and aggression has endured in our cultural imagination. In the decades since, the experiment has inspired a movie, episodes ofVeronica Mars and Community, and a documentary series, so it was only a matter of time before someone settled on the Stanford prison experiment as something that should get the reality-TV treatment. And it’s not really a surprise that the someone in this instance is Netflix, the streamer who looked at the anti-capitalist critique of its hit series Squid Game and thought, We should make areality competitionout of this.
To be fair, The New Stanford Experiment— executive produced by Jane Lipsitz and Dan Cutforth, whose previous projects include Project Runway andTop Chef — doesn’t describe itself as a reality competition but rather a “bold reimagining of one of history’s most controversial social experiments.” But while there may not be a prize offered or a winner declared, so much of the internal mechanics of this unscripted series feel straight out of a reality competition: A cast of participants (including multiple content creators) are divided into opposing groups and given tasks to complete, occasionally being called upon to deliver talking-head interviews about their experience, while a panel of experts watch and comment on the events in real time. All of that aligns the series with a particular strain of reality show in which participants are expected to follow certain patterns of behavior that can be neatly edited into episodic arcs. Like so much reality TV,The New Stanford Prison Experiment invites a level of performance from its chosen guards and inmates, because, well, they know they’re on TV.
With all the volunteers play-acting their roles, the series feels markedly less “real” than a previous Netflix attempt at a similar concept, Unlocked: A Jail Experiment, in which actual prisoners in Alabama and Arizona were given the opportunity to govern themselves, or the multi-season A&E series60 Days In, in which volunteers went undercover in correctional facilities to observe both officers’ and inmates’ behavior. (Both series have been criticized over their ethics and legality, but 60 Days In has also resulted in various officers getting fired or investigated.) Where those two series slot comfortably into the docuseries category, though, The New Stanford Prison Experiment follows the outline of a competition program more than it does a genuine social study. The addition of “new” in the title positions the show as a corrective to the original experiment, one with “no interference, no bias, just observation,” according to behavioral psychologist Alison Wood Brooks, one of the series’ three commentators, alongside journalist Trymaine Lee and federal corrections professional Michael Cantrell. But staging all this as a TV show is a variable The New Stanford Prison Experiment fails to control for, undermining its own claim of “no interference.”
The series begins with a prison bus pulling up to a correctional facility in Georgia, where the commander of jail operations, Major Boughner, announces how the 30 participants, 27 men and 3 women, will be divided. They’ll begin the 14-day experiment with two four-member guard units (one for day, one for night), and the other 22 participants will be inmates. Guards stay at an off-site hotel after their shift ends and eat whatever they want; inmates get locked in their cells at night and have a diet comprised of many shades of gray food. Brooks explains that all the volunteers will go through “four preplanned phases that are going to help us get closer to understanding how power dynamics influence people’s behavior”: transformation, hierarchy, role reversal, and self-governance. These neatly episodic phases clue us into the storytelling arc the series has grafted onto this experiment. Eventually there will be power struggles between the guards and the inmates in the “hierarchy” section, and the guards will become inmates during “role reversal.”
As the show progressed through these phases, I kept getting distracted, wondering how these volunteers were recruited, especially since so many of them talk about their participation in contradictory terms. Extremely hateable oil-rig supervisor Chet Hudson talks about how he only wants to be a guard. “I absolutely want to break that person,” he says of inmates who dare to question the power imbalance. High-school teacher Pete Zaremba is interested in persuading others to rebel against the guard-inmate binary, an approach that puts him at odds with a few of the series’ Black participants, like property manager Anthony Terry, who notes how “if you deny and disobey” orders from police, “it usually turns into an ‘accidental’ shooting.” (It would have been interesting for producers to prod at how the realities of police violence shape Terry’s time on a TV show that will presumably keep him safe, but alas, The New Stanford Prison Experiment doesn’t want to acknowledge that it’s a TV show.) But most other contestants aren’t really engaging with the series’ “experiment.” Instead, they talk about how the show will make them better leaders and better fathers, and seem to be approaching it like a Survivor– or Alone-style personal challenge rather than a social study.
These comments are so all over the place that I can’t wrap my head around how producers cast for this, and the show never elaborates on the process. What did the participants understand as the goal of the experiment? How were they encouraged to act? What were they offered in return for their time — the inflation-adjusted equivalent of the original $15 per day given to Stanford participants, or some other amount, or maybe just the opportunity to be on TV? If it’s the latter, that’s another element of reality-TV performativeness that the series avoids reconciling. About half of the inmates are never identified by name onscreen and aren’t featured in talking-head interviews. But those who do use words like journey and talk about how they want to make their parents or children proud, reflecting how this format invites participants to think of this as a TV show first, a social experiment second. They’re performing their individual personalities, and despite the panelists insisting that there are real insights playing out in the unit, the volunteers are so resistant to doing anything that would upend the imbalanced status quo that they don’t really engage with the experiment’s tests of power and control.
As you would assume from the outcome of the original experiment, some guards relish being in charge of other people. In the first half of the season, The New Stanford Prison Experiment’s tension is driven by differences in the day and night shifts; the former guards are hard-asses and the latter have a more, as one inmate says, “church camp mentality.” Hudson is practically a cartoon villain when the guards decide to put two contestants in 23 hours of confinement after they tell other inmates that they’re thinking about refusing to put their faces on the floor during the next riot drill. All these inmates do is discussthe possibility of noncompliance, and they receive the harshest punishment available to the guards. Yes, power corrupts. Of course!
Once The New Stanford Prison Experimentproves the same lesson as its predecessor, what else is there? Not much, because most of the contestants treat their time on the show as something to ride out. Brooks is surprised by how many inmates abide by a “comply and survive” approach, buddying up to the guards and turning on the small handful of inmates who remind everyone else that they’re in an experiment where they have power to push back. I can’t say I’m surprised, though, because “comply and survive” is exactly the kind of keep-your-head-down strategy someone trying to win a reality competition might follow. It doesn’t matter that The New Stanford Prison Experiment offers no prize. The series is so indebted to this genre that the participants organize themselves into groupthink that both reaffirms the study’s original observations and underscores how much participants have internalized the tidy reality-TV arcs of self-discovery and endurance. Why are men crying in their talking-head interviews about how they’re doing the Stanford prison experiment for their kids and their elderly parents? Because reality TV told them to.
The series’ most potentially radical idea, one that doesn’t quite pay off because the editing is so heavy on the masculine experience, is the inclusion of three women volunteers. The commentators’ panel hypes up their presence as a major difference from the original all-male experiment, with Lee asking, “Do the women assert themselves more or less?” But the series feels like it’s tipping its hand when all three women are chosen as guards and stay guards, even when their male counterparts are eventually turned into inmates. I’m not suggesting that the women should have been thrown in with the male inmates, necessarily, not when the latter so casually throw around terms like bitch and pussy to describe men who quit the series. But this is such a placid group that there’s no real tension between the female guards and the male inmates, and therefore no new insights raised about how complicated a woman’s role in this power dynamic could be.
In the penultimate episode,The New Stanford Prison Experimentremoves the women entirely by dismissing all the guards and letting the inmates govern themselves; it’s an abrupt ending to this supposedly distinct consideration of the female experience, and a sign of how unequipped the series was to grapple with the new variables it introduced. If The New Stanford Prison Experimentreally wanted to do something different, it could have conducted this study with women only, placing them in the role of both guards and inmates and seeing what imbalances or alliances materialized out of that dynamic. Do a whole gender-swap thing, market it as an anti–Real Housewives, and accept that the series is less a documentary than a diversion. Wait, did I just describe an Orange Is the New Blackreality-competition offshoot? I’ve heard those have worked for Netflix before … Squid Game: The Challenge, you have competition.
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