Netflix is airing a six-part restaging of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment as critics call the series depraved reality television posing as science.
The streamer put 30 participants into guard and inmate roles for The New Stanford Prison Experiment, a show built to test whether power corrupts. Eight played guards. Twenty-two played inmates. Reviewers did not treat it as serious research.
Daily Mail reporting framed the series against a longer record of reality formats that isolated people, hid the truth from contestants, or turned body weight and private humiliation into prime-time spectacle, shows many now say would never be greenlit.
Netflix has insisted guardrails were in place to protect participants. That defense has not quieted the verdict from major outlets covering the drop.
The original Stanford study, run in 1971 with 24 male American college students split into 12 inmates and 12 guards, was stopped after six days because of abuse. The new version stretches the premise across six episodes and a larger cast.
USA Today labeled the project “depraved” and rejected the higher purpose.
"Stanford pretends to be some kind of revolutionary experiment out to find some universal truth about humanity, but it is no different than [The Traitors] in prison jumpsuits."
The Guardian called the rehash “insulting” and denied it any scientific cover.
"This rehash of the notorious study in which volunteers role-play as prisoners and guards pretends to be science. It isn’t, it’s patronising reality television."
The Sydney Morning Herald went further on tone, calling the series “repellent,” even while granting it was thought-provoking. The dispute is not whether cameras rolled. It is whether a streaming platform should restage a study already infamous for how fast ordinary volunteers turned cruel.
Long before Netflix’s prison set, Japanese television locked an aspiring comedian in a bare room and made his suffering the gag.
In 1998, on Susunu! Denpa Shonen, Tomoaki Hamatsu, known as Nasubi, was stripped of belongings and clothes, left alone, and told to enter magazine competitions until he could claim roughly one million yen, about £6,000. He was 22. Producers fed the ordeal to an audience of around 17 million people a week.
He lived on uncooked rice, about 5kg of it, until the supply failed. On day 80 he faced wet dog food. The isolation did not end when he hit the prize target. After a brief “freedom,” producers conned him into continuing. The total stretch reached 434 days. When the walls finally fell, he learned the whole ordeal had been a studio broadcast.
BBC iPlayer’s synopsis later put the core offense in plain words: the fame came “without his knowledge or consent.” Nasubi’s own account, given to The Sun, was bleaker still.
"The loneliness affected me much more than not being able to eat or not having clothes."
"There were so many moments where I thought it probably would be better to die now than keep going."
He described the rice running out, the dog food, and diary lines about nutrition failing his brain and a “madness” taking hold. “I thought my life was over. So many times I wanted to die.” The diaries became a best-seller. Japan got a celebrity. The method was captivity sold as entertainment.
Sky One’s 2004 series There’s Something About Miriam sent six “typical lads” to compete for Mexican model Miriam Rivera and a £10,000 prize. Producers withheld a central fact until after the winner was named: Rivera was transgender and had not had gender-affirming surgery.
Tom Rooke, then a lifeguard, won. He later moved into acting. Other contestants, Toby Green, Scott Gibson, Aron Lane, Dominic Conway, and Mark Dimino, sued. The case settled, with the figure rumoured around £500,000.
Rivera later appeared in a Channel 4 documentary, Miriam: Death Of A Reality Star. She died in Mexico in 2019 at age 38. Authorities ruled the death a suicide. Her husband, Daniel Cuervo, has insisted she was murdered. The show’s premise was not a misunderstanding. It was a reveal staged for maximum shock after men had already competed for her on camera.
Sky One’s Fat Families, two series in 2010, cast “former fatty” Steve Miller, a motivational speaker who had lost four stone, as the man who moved in for 24 hours, monitored diet and lifestyle, and issued plans. Season two, Second Helpings, revisited households. The host’s on-air language was the product.
Miller called one household “one of the fattest families I've ever met in my life” and said they were “grazing their way to an early grave.” Other lines included “right beached blubber bellies,” “Mr and Mrs Massive Fatty,” and “Watch out massive fatties, the lard police are in town!” Years later, Gen Z accounts recycled the clips on TikTok. The cruelty was not a glitch. It was the hook.
Channel 4’s Supersize v Superskinny ran from 2008 to 2014. Participants lived together for five days in a feeding clinic under Dr Christian Jessen, eating each other’s diets, then followed a three-month healthy plan. An eating-disorder segment featured specialist psychiatrist and dietitian Ursula Philpot. Channel 4 pointed to medical supervision. Eating-disorder charity B-eat was not impressed.
Chief executive Susan Ringwood put the objection without soft edges.
"They're deadly, not entertainment."
Shows can hire doctors and still build an audience on body extremes. That is the business model the criticism targeted.
In May 2014, Fox aired one season of I Wanna Marry Harry. Twelve American women were flown to Englefield House, an Elizabethan country home in Berkshire, England, to compete for a man presented as Prince Harry. He was lookalike Matthew Hicks. The real prince was single after splitting from Cressida Bonas and years from meeting Meghan Markle. The women got three days isolated in hotel rooms and 24/7 monitoring.
Hicks has said he agreed to take part if he did not have to flat-out lie, then learned producers would reveal him as “Harry” without warning him first. “At the time I had no idea they were going to do that. I was a bit miffed and felt quite stressed,” he said, adding he still knew he had signed up for the show.
A decade later, winner Kimberly Birch and contestants including Meghan Jones and Chelsea Brookshire described the machine on journalist Scott Bryan’s podcast. Birch recalled staff planting a newspaper item about Prince Harry for contestant Kelly to find, then whisking it away. She also described security theater outside their rooms and a guard telling a producer they had to get “him” back to the palace because of a royal-family “situation.”
Jones remembered producers yelling to stop filming, gathering the women off camera, and warning that their safety mattered because they were dealing with a “high target individual.” She thought the off-camera panic meant the threat was real. “I didn't think they would do anything off camera that would be that shady, so I thought they were actually being realistic.”
Food control tightened the screw. Jones said she could not simply grab an apple or even water, and for a stretch of filming she stole breakfast digestives, hid them in her bra, and stashed them in a sock drawer. Birch said the constant skewing of what was real taught her a lot about “brainwashing.” Production did not need a prison set. It needed a mansion, a lookalike, and a closed information loop.
Across these formats the pattern repeats. Hide the premise. Isolate the subject. Script the reveal. Film the breakdown. Call it a social experiment, a makeover, or a fairy-tale romance when the engine is control.
Nasubi’s 434 days, Miriam’s post-finale lawsuit and later death under disputed circumstances, Miller’s on-air fat insults, clinic diet swaps aimed at viewers with eating disorders, and a fake prince managed like a security asset all sold the same product: ordinary people under pressure for someone else’s overnight numbers.
Netflix’s prison restaging arrives with talk of guardrails and a big question about power. Critics hearing “science” answer with “reality television.” They have the older catalog on their side. When the industry says a premise would never be made now, it usually means the same premise is back with better lighting.
Human dignity is not a prop department item, and an audience that keeps rewarding humiliation should not act surprised when the next “experiment” shows up in the queue.
