How Close To The Stanford Prison Experiment Can A Reality Show Get?

“Ahoy there, perverts!” are the first words out of Gabby Windey’s mouth. The host of the new Hulu show Love Overboard stands on the deck of a 280-foot superyacht named The Chakra, wearing a gorgeous, slinky dress with cut-out sections. “Welcome to Love Overboard!” she says, throwing her hands over her head.

The appetite for reality shows about young, hot, stupid people competing to find love or Instagram followers, or both, is bottomless. It’s a crowded field. Off the top of my head, there’s Temptation Island, Perfect Match, Love is Blind, Love Island, Too Hot to Handle, FBoy Island, Single’s Inferno, The Bachelor, Are You the One? and The Ultimatum. And most of those programs have seasons in multiple countries and multiple languages. There is an endless buffet of choices for anyone who wants to watch people in bikinis backstab each other in order to make out with someone they’ve never met before, which is perhaps how Love Overboard‘s premise ended up as deranged as it is.

The contestants on Love Overboard (young hot singles, duh) do not know what they have signed up for. They have agreed to go on a reality television show sight unseen, and now they are here, in what nobody wants to admit is essentially the Stanford Prison Experiment.

The Stanford Prison Experiment is a very famous, not replicable, possibly fraudulent, and definitely unethical 1971 psychological study set up as a two-week prison simulation where participants were divided into guards and prisoners. Lead researcher Philip Zimbardo ended the study early after six days because the guards became so violent and brutal against the prisoners. Despite the many, many problems with Zimbardo’s methodology and controls, the Stanford Prison Experiment is often used as an example of how cruel humans can be to each other if given a modicum of power, and how willing they are to oppress one another if given the option.

Now I want to you imagine … what if this were a reality show about love? Because of shit like the Stanford Prison Experiment, sociologists and psychologists have required morals and standards now, so the closest we ever get to true watchable psychological torture is on reality television. What kind of laws are there on a superyacht? It feels like maybe none!

On Love Overboard—executive-produced by Alex Cooper and Jeff Jenkins—contestants can be in one of two places: living a life of luxury as part of one of four couples on the topside deck, or sent downside into the belly of the yacht where they must remain single, sleep in bunk beds, and cook and clean for the official couples on the top deck. Instead of prisoners and guards, we have topsiders (the elite) and downsiders (servants).

The only way for a downsider to become a topsider and live a life of luxury is for them to break up a topside couple. The mechanics of the show are a little confusing, because there is a lot going on. One way that a topside couple can be broken up is during the challenges. The other way someone can break up a couple and move to the topside is by earning a date. The dates are maybe earned by flirting? It’s a little unclear to me, but one downsider is given the opportunity to take a topsider on a date, and then after the date, we reach what is the show’s best mechanism: THE PLANK CEREMONY.

After the date, the topsider (who, remember, did not get to choose to go on this date) must decide whether they want to remain in their original couple or dump that person and recouple with the downsider who took them on the date. I am thrilled to report that they are not allowed to have a normal conversation about this. No no no. That is not fun. What they do instead is force both of the people the topsider could recouple with to go stand at the ends of two side-by-side gangplanks. They plead their case to the person standing on the deck, while the rest of the cast looks on. One of them is chosen to be in the couple on the topside. The other is then dropped 30 feet into the ocean. This part of the show fucking rules. It is so funny to watch someone get dropped from a gangplank into the Mediterranean Sea, and it is made funnier by the fact that they are usually dressed nicely with full faces of makeup, begging some random hottie to keep them.

The show really shines in the fifth episode, where one man named Andrew has a complete meltdown and has to call his mom on camera to talk him down because someone cut his hair weird and “destroyed his sideburns.” (His hair looks exactly the same to me.) Then later in the episode, someone goes on a date and has to pick between two women. The women go out onto the gangplank, and he just … can’t decide. They stand up there for 15, 20, 30, 36 minutes on the plank. “Be a fucking man!” another contestant yells at him from the top deck. At 42 minutes, host Gabby has to say “David, for fuck’s sake,” to force him to make a decision, and 43 minutes after walking out onto the planks, one of the women falls into the ocean while the rest of the contestants scream.

But when Love Overboard achieves this excellent drama, it doesn’t really know what to do with it. The show is too concerned with its mechanics and plans and future “twists” to understand that people do not watch reality television to see a bunch of mechanics and plans and twists. You watch a love reality show because you want to see how other people treat each other—to understand a little more about the world around you by watching two 10s lick each other in a spin-the-bottle game and make someone else cry. The problem with the show isn’t immorality or emotional warfare against its contestants. Who cares about that? Love Overboard flounders because it is afraid of itself.

After the fifth episode, the structure of the show completely collapses. The contestants have to go to a party with all the people previously dropped off the planks, then they have to recouple again, then they have to, I think, vote against each other? Once the show moves away from its arbitrary class system and into a more traditional dating-show format where contestants meet each other’s best friends and vote on who they think is the “strongest couple,” Love Overboard loses what made the first five episodes feel fun and special: its willingness to admit that reality shows about finding love are unethical psychological experiments. Rather than lean into the chores and divisions while creating class consciousness, it steps back just as it was close to something worth watching. Instead, all it can offer is people plummeting from a gangplank into the sea. Which, granted, is still very funny.