Review: 'The New Stanford Prison Experiment' reimagines a social project for our viewing entertainment

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Set us as preferred 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 “reimaginat...