Way back when reality TV was just a foal getting up on its wobbly legs, it was common to describe such programs as “social experiments.” In that they involved groups of people living in close quarters in programs that had no predetermined outcome, you could say they were; however, they proved nothing other than that there was an audience for “real life” soap operas even the most gullible viewers knew were at least half unreal. This has since been demonstrated a thousand times over, and much show business brain power has been dedicated to thinking up new ways to dress a handful of basic formats. So you can call that experiment a success, I guess.
Academic intentions, or pretensions, are pushed to the fore in “The New Stanford Prison Experiment.” Billed as “A Netflix Experiment” and premiering Wednesday on that streamer, it sits equidistant from the actual Stanford Prison Experiment, “Big Brother” and “Wonka’s the Golden Ticket.” Every new television series is a sort of experiment, of course — can this attract an audience? — but this is surely the first reality show to adapt an actual social experiment, the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, a controversial, flawed investigation into power dynamics. Set in a simulated prison with participants divided into inmates and guards, it was planned to run as long as two weeks but was canceled after six days when the guards’ commitment to the bit went too far. That power tends to corrupt is not a new idea — Lord Acton wrote that line in 1887, there was “Macbeth” a few hundred years before that, and the principle is demonstrated in the news every day. Of course, “tends” is not the same thing as “does,” which is where we reach the limits of generalization.
There are as many differences as similarities in Netflix’s “reimagination” of the original project, which presumes to correct its predecessor’s flaws (“no interference, no bias, just observation”), while substituting some imperfections of its own. Obviously, that this is made for television is the biggest change. “New Stanford” comes with a trio of experts — host Alison Wood Brooks, a behavioral psychologist; “federal corrections professional” Michael Cantrell; and journalist Trymaine Lee — whose contribution amounts to a sort of color commentary. Scholarly references aside, much of what they say might describe a football, or a fútbol, game. (“He’s got the vest, I don’t know if he’s got the leadership.”)
Instead of the basement of the Stanford University psychology building, the series takes place in an actual prison, somewhere in Georgia. The 30 participants are not college students responding to an ad to join a “psychological study of prison life,” but rather a carefully assembled cast of various ages (none too young, none too old) and backgrounds; some have had difficult childhoods, some have families of their own, one has been in prison. They are signing up in part for, here’s that word again, an experiment, but also to be on a TV show; they go in with ideas and assumptions about both. They have their reasons, at least those participants deemed interesting enough to focus on — a challenge, an adventure, something to prove. They’re hoping to get something out of it, besides whatever the producers are paying them. (There is no cash prize waiting at the end: This is for science.)
Instead of just throwing the players into a blender until the motor shorts out, “The New Stanford Prison Experiment” takes them through four planned phases — transition, hierarchy, role reversal and self-governance — changes that wake up a show that consists largely of prisoners complaining about the guards or one another, the guards complaining about the prisoners or one another, and here and there an individual acting up to no great effect. (Much like real prison, perhaps.) The fourth quarter turns things around in a way not entirely unexpected; it does make for a nice arc.
It’s not merely a matter of prisoners versus guards, etc., but participants versus the experiment itself; Pete Zaremba, a fifth grade social studies teacher who will emerge as a main character, says, “I’m essentially a guard every day, I don’t want to be a guard anymore … I wanna pull pranks on the guards, I wanna test the experiment, mess with the other inmates.” That it’s all a charade that can be overturned by refusing to play is obvious to all, but it’s more on some minds than others; some get tired of the game, others want to perform well in the roles for which they’ve been cast.
In the end it doesn’t offer any grand theory of human behavior, only what you knew already, that everyone is different. One guard engages the inmates in team-building games, as if on a company retreat (“If you have the hearts of people, they will do anything for you”), another wants nothing to do with their hearts. And not everyone wants power in the first place. Watching humans try to get along, get along or fail to get along is the warp drive of reality entertainment and as such “The New Stanford Prison Experiment,” metaphorical lab coat aside, chugs along reliably on its six-episode mission to go where no television show has gone before, more or less.
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