Television has rerun the Stanford prison experiment before, most notably in 2002 when the BBC aired The Experiment, which advertised itself as a more rigorous version of the stunt where volunteers role-play as prison guards and prisoners. The creator of the original 1971 experiment, Philip Zimbardo, would probably have criticised the new versions to preserve his own status, but the main point he made was valid. These people all know they’re on TV, he said.
They’re playing to the cameras. Whether the participants in a behavioural study forget they’re part of a study is an eternal debate point. One of the strengths of the other notorious American people-are-awful research project, the Milgram experiment, was that it made the artifice part of the process, telling the volunteers that they’d spoil the science if they didn’t keep giving strangers electric shocks: “The experiment requires that you continue.” Without that, the stooges may never act naturally; if they know the experiment is also a TV show, they definitely won’t.
Reality TV has a similar credibility problem: although a show might say it’s found a group of ordinary people and put them in such-and-such a situation, the obvious answer is always that they’re not ordinary people. They applied to be on reality TV, which ordinary people don’t do. The two issues combine in Netflix’s The New Stanford Prison Experiment, which has hired part of a real county correctional facility in Georgia and filled it with 30 people divided into two factions: eight guards, three of whom are women, and 22 prisoners, all male.
The haves wear sleek grey uniforms, set the rules and retire to their hotel between shifts; the have-nots are given bright yellow jumpsuits and scratchy bunk beds, and eat tasteless slop under harsh strip-lighting. It keeps pretending to be a study of whether power corrupts in an institutional environment, but it is undeniably reality TV to its core, starting with how it’s presented to us. As well as seeing what the prisoners and guards have done, we’re told about it by them in the obligatory to-camera interviews, filmed afterwards.
Also informing us about events we have just witnessed for ourselves are a trio of experts – a behavioural psychologist, a former federal correctional officer and, er, a journalist – watching a bank of screens. The series runs to six episodes, which could have been four if the patronising recaps had been edited out. Inside the jail, any hope that the TV prisoners and guards might forget where they are and start behaving like actual prisoners and guards is soon lost.
Everyone constantly references the “experiment”, and the show refuses to sit still for more than half an episode before drawing on textbook reality TV tricks to engineer discord: the guards are split into night and day teams, which undermine each other by approaching the task differently; they are asked to elect a head guard, which irks those not picked; at the halfway point in the series, some prisoners and guards switch roles. None of it is real, and nobody thinks it is. The show doesn’t create any moments where the contestants suspend their disbelief – as in The Traitors, where the faithfuls sometimes start genuinely seeing the traitors as duplicitous villains.
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