Thirty people walk into a real prison. A coin flip, more or less, decides who will be a guard and who will be a prisoner. Then the cameras watch what happens.
That is the premise of “The New Stanford Prison Experiment,” an unscripted series Netflix has commissioned, Variety reported exclusively on September 15. It debuts October 21 with a first season of six 45-minute episodes. Alfred Street Industries produces, and Jane Lipsitz, Dan Cutforth, Nan Strait, Dan Volpe, Jeff Grogan and Mike Odair are executive producers.
The official synopsis says the participants, “thrust into a system of power, hierarchy, and control,” will find out whether ordinary people inevitably conform to the roles they are given, or whether “empathy, morality, and individuality” can hold against the pressure. Its closing line asks: “Does power corrupt?”
The original, and why it ended
The study it borrows from was run on the Stanford campus in 1971 by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. It was meant to last two weeks. It stopped after less than a week, because those assigned as guards had begun abusing those assigned as prisoners, among other ethical concerns. That experiment and others from the same period led to stricter rules protecting human participants.
Lipsitz did not pretend the old study was clean. “Despite its serious ethical flaws, it asked a fundamental question that feels even more relevant today: how does power affect ethical choices?” she said. Reimagining it, she added, was “one of the most intense, exhilarating, and definitely nail-biting experiences we’ve ever had,” and she thanked Netflix as a backer of projects that “take risks, push boundaries and tell challenging stories.”
The experiment has been retold many times already, in books, documentaries, docuseries and scripted versions. One of them is the 2015 feature film “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” in which Billy Crudup played Zimbardo.
