There is something almost impressively misguided about Netflix’s decision to revisit the Stanford Prison Experiment. The original 1971 study has spent decades being presented as a cautionary tale about the corrupting influence of power, even as researchers have increasingly challenged its methodology and the conclusions drawn from it. So what better way to revisit that controversial legacy than to turn it into a reality show?

That is the premise of The New Stanford Prison Experiment, a six-episode Netflix series that places 30 volunteers inside a real prison, assigns them roles as guards and prisoners, and watches what happens when one group gets to make the rules for the other.

The results are occasionally fascinating, sometimes uncomfortable and, more often than they should be, downright tedious. But the show’s biggest problem isn’t that it fails to recreate the infamous experiment. It’s that it appears to repeat some of the original’s most troubling methodological mistakes while adding the familiar reality-TV impulse to manufacture drama whenever the action threatens to stall.

If the central question is whether power corrupts, perhaps the more interesting question is what happens when television producers decide they need to make that corruption happen on schedule.

For anyone who needs a refresher, psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford study assigned college students to play guards and prisoners in a simulated prison. The experiment was supposed to last up to two weeks but was halted after six days as conditions deteriorated and participants experienced distress.

The popular interpretation was that ordinary people could quickly become cruel when handed authority, while those deprived of power would become submissive. It was a powerful story, which is one reason it entered the cultural bloodstream. It was also a deeply flawed piece of research.

Subsequent examinations of the experiment’s records found that guards had received instructions encouraging hostile and oppressive behavior. That complicates the claim that the study simply observed what happens when people are placed in positions of power.

Netflix’s version, unfortunately, seems determined to revisit that problem.

The production has made a point of emphasizing its safeguards. Participants underwent psychological screening, could use a safe word to leave at any time, and had access to psychological support. Executive producer Jane Lipsitz has described the project as a reimagining with updated protections and expert oversight.

Those are meaningful differences from the original. But ethical safeguards and scientific validity are two different things. You can protect participants from harm while still conducting a production that compromises its own premise.

And that’s where the series begins to unravel.

At one point, guards are instructed to maintain control and avoid showing weakness. The production also introduces challenges designed to test the participants, including a confrontation involving riot gear. Meanwhile, the day and night shifts are prevented from communicating normally, setting up predictable disagreements over rules and authority.

Consider the implications. If the guards are explicitly encouraged to assert their dominance, can their subsequent behavior really tell us much about how people naturally respond to power? If producers deliberately create conflict between shifts, is the resulting breakdown in authority a discovery about human behavior or simply the predictable consequence of a television production setting up a fight?

The distinction matters. A documentary can observe people in a difficult environment. A reality show can create challenges and introduce twists to keep an audience engaged. But a production that does both while claiming to investigate a serious psychological question has an obligation to explain where observation ends and manipulation begins.

The New Stanford Prison Experiment doesn’t offer a convincing answer.

The producers may argue that their interventions are intended to test different responses under different circumstances. But that justification risks becoming circular: The production creates a situation, the participants react to it, and the resulting behavior is presented as evidence about the effects of power.

That isn’t necessarily evidence of nothing. It is, however, a long way from the clean demonstration of human nature the show’s framing seems to promise.

There are glimpses of a better series buried beneath all the manufactured tension.

The contrasting approaches of the guard shifts provide a useful illustration of how leadership can shape an environment. One leader favors a more cooperative atmosphere, while another takes a harder line on compliance. Their differences create an opportunity to explore whether authority necessarily produces abuse or whether individual temperament and group dynamics matter just as much.

The participants also bring their own experiences and assumptions about authority into the prison. Those differences could have made the series a thoughtful examination of race, privilege, obedience and the ways people interpret institutional power.

Instead, the show too often treats these moments as ingredients in a familiar reality-TV recipe: introduce a disagreement, amplify the consequences, and wait for somebody to lose their temper.

The series also struggles to make its participants’ motivations feel meaningful. These are volunteers who know they are participating in a Netflix production. They understand, at least in broad terms, that the experience will eventually end and that their actions may be watched by millions of people.

That awareness changes the equation. Someone playing a prisoner on television is not in the same psychological position as someone serving an actual prison sentence. Someone playing a guard knows that the authority being exercised is temporary and artificial, even when the surroundings feel disturbingly real.

The show acknowledges some of these complications, but it never adequately reconciles them with its larger claims.

The decision to film in a real correctional facility gives the series an immediate visual advantage. The cells, restrictive routines and institutional atmosphere provide a sense of confinement that a studio set would struggle to reproduce. The production also uses remote cameras to minimize direct contact between filmmakers and participants.

But authenticity of location is not authenticity of experiment.

The CNN report on the series revisits the original study’s controversial history and the questions surrounding its scientific credibility. That history should have been the starting point for a more rigorous examination of what a modern recreation could actually establish.

Instead, Netflix has produced something caught between two ambitions. As reality television, it needs conflict, escalating stakes and enough unexpected behavior to justify six episodes. As an examination of psychology, it needs to avoid steering participants toward the very outcomes it hopes to observe.

Those goals are not impossible to reconcile, but the series doesn’t do the work required to make them coexist.

The result is a show that can be engaging in isolated moments without becoming especially persuasive as an experiment. It offers no compelling new explanation for how power operates, and its production choices make it difficult to know how much of the behavior on screen would have emerged without intervention.

There is also an ethical question that goes beyond the participants’ safety. When a show borrows the authority of scientific research to sell an entertainment premise, viewers deserve to know whether they are watching a controlled investigation or a carefully managed reality-TV environment.

The most revealing thing about The New Stanford Prison Experiment may be what it unintentionally demonstrates about the people making it.

Producers control the setting, establish the rules, decide when to introduce new challenges and ultimately determine which moments become part of the story. Participants may have the freedom to leave, but they do not control the environment in which their behavior is being observed — or the narrative through which that behavior reaches the audience.

That is a considerable amount of power.

Netflix has produced plenty of reality shows in which manipulation and manufactured conflict are part of the entertainment contract. Viewers understand that competitions have twists and that producers want compelling television. The problem here is that The New Stanford Prison Experiment asks to be taken seriously as something more than another reality series.

It wants to explore whether authority changes people while obscuring the extent to which its own authority shapes the experiment.

The series is not without moments of genuine human insight, and its participants occasionally make the familiar machinery of reality television feel secondary to the more complicated questions at hand. But those moments are too sporadic to overcome the central contradiction.

The original Stanford experiment became infamous partly because the line between observation and intervention blurred. Netflix’s version should have been an opportunity to examine that failure with greater care.

Instead, it often feels as though the producers learned the wrong lesson.