REVIEW: ‘The New Stanford Prison Experiment’ Is Completely Despicable

Who possibly thought that restaging The New Stanford Prison Experiment as a Netflix reality show was a good idea? When you hear “Stanford Prison Experiment,” what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Certainly not “let’s try it again.” The 1971 experiment is infamous for being an entirely unethical and generally unscientific attempt to understand power dynamics. Students were locked in a prison, some as prisoners and some as guards, and the scenario quickly devolved into something so insidiously violent that it was canceled after only six of its fourteen days.

Nobody should have been allowed to attempt replicating this experiment. It should be a no-brainer. There is no way to modernize this experiment or create safeguards that make the experience psychologically safer while remaining scientifically valuable. The only reason to redo this monstrosity is for pure entertainment. And locking people in a prison and forcing them into social contrivances while filming their every move deserves worse than a slap on the wrist for even suggesting it, let alone producing it.

The New Stanford Prison Experiment is embarrassingly unscientific.

But produce it Netflix did. The two main attempts to create safeguards around The New Stanford Prison Experiment are how aware everyone is of the purpose of the experiment, and how clear it is that they can leave at any time. The former immediately breaks the experiment. If people know that they are being tested to see how they are shaped by authority and control, inevitably, there will be participants who come in with the intention not to play along.

And because participants can leave at any time, The New Stanford Prison Experiment is rendered pretty much useless. Much of the reason the original disaster went so off the rails was that the participants were under the impression that they couldn’t leave. There was also seemingly no restriction on violence, which, clearly, and thankfully, the Netflix atrocity has to impose. But if participants have all the reason to buck expectations and no reason to stick around to suffer the consequences, what possibly could be the point?

The point of The New Stanford Prison Experiment seems to be nothing except entertainment. It’s structured like any other reality TV show. The episodes cut to background footage of each participant as the show goes on, and they participate in multiple rounds of haphazard, dizzyingly cut confessionals. Between rounds of prison footage, the show switches to a producer’s eye view, where four producers ogle what is happening in their pathetic little “experiment.”

They attempt to pop psychologize what the prisoners and guards are experiencing while seeming to get a sick enjoyment out of what they are witnessing day after day. Nothing they have to say is interesting. For all we know, they could be actors brought in after the fact to pad out the episodes and lend the “experiment” an air of legitimacy with their prognostication and rambling.

It’s just gross. Prison isn’t a playground for entertaining the masses. And nothing about The New Stanford Prison Experiment respects the terrible realities of the way power impacts the real carceral system. You cannot have a TV show in 2026 about power set in a prison using real people, many of whom have experienced prison themselves, and just pretend that it’s a place where people sit around and socialize with mutual respect.

The first minutes of the show tell the audience that its prison block is mixed with real prisoners. And yet, the people actually imprisoned here are completely ignored, and so are the real-life dynamics that led the producers to plumb it for their sick sense of entertainment. It’s reprehensible.

The New Stanford Prison Experiment isn’t even entertaining.

Maybe worst of all is that The New Stanford Prison Experiment is also dreadfully boring. All this for nothing. Almost nothing interesting happens from one end of an episode to the next. Most of the participants just exist in the background. You can easily forget they are even there with how little screen time they get.

There are attempts to keep things interesting, or “further the experiment,” with pre-planned mix-ups, including that there are three female guards. But these mix-ups either instantly fall flat in their effect or make the “experiment” muddier by introducing far too many variables.

The people who cause enough of a ruckus to get on camera are exactly the kind of people you’d expect: The ones who don’t want to legitimize the thing they signed up to participate in. It gets old quickly. And whenever the producers introduce elements that are meant to sow some chaos, people either quietly fall in line or everyone just starts ignoring what they’re “supposed” to be doing. It’s not like you’re endeared to these people at all, so they either come across as whiny or as boring. And as soon as things get tough, they just get up and leave.

The New Stanford Prison Experiment absolutely should not exist.

Sure, the fact that they leave says something about how power impacts people. Sort of. But it’s not saying anything that needed saying. And certainly not anything that required staging an elaborate fake prison scenario to say it. If they wanted to experiment with power and authority, they didn’t have to go to prison for it. And if they wanted to create a reality show about power, pretending to be in prison and pretending to recreate the most infamous failed experiment on the books are the most outrageously offensive ways to possibly do it.

No. Just, no. Do not watch this show. Do not think about this show. Do not even acknowledge that this show ever happened, unless it’s to say what an embarrassing mistake it was for everyone involved. This show shouldn’t exist, and even as it does, it offers absolutely nothing worth spending your time watching—it’s poorly conceived, poorly made, poorly cast, and poorly produced. Just, no.

The New Stanford Prison Experiment is streaming now on Netflix. Do not watch it.