In 1971, some guys from a university in Northern California performed crazy stunts in a basement for a few days, and we’re still talking about it. No, this had nothing to do with playing Jefferson Airplane tapes backwards while on LSD. We are talking about a social science experiment called “the Stanford prison experiment‘ which has been used by nihilists for decades as concrete evidence that all humans are secretly sadistic beasts. A new three-part Nat Geo series, The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truthwhich premieres on November 13, does its best to explain what really happened.

You’ve probably heard of the experiment if you’ve taken a sociology course. (That is, if you want to teach instead of hanging out in basements listening to the Jefferson Plane, man.) Over the summer holidays, 38-year-old psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, who ostensibly tried to study the effects of depersonalization and undeserved authority wanted to investigate, decorated a basement at Stanford University to resemble a prison, paid some students for two weeks of work and turned them loose to create a closed institutional system. And started recording.

The students (“good boys,” as Zimbardo calls them in decades of archival interviews) were randomly selected as guards or prisoners. Things went wrong in a very short time. Left to their own devices, the prisoners short-circuited and rioted, the guards went mad and evil with power, and, only thanks to an intervention from Zimbardo’s girlfriend on day six of a planned 14, the whole thing was called off before anyone was seriously injured . The research was funded by the US Office of Naval Research, but for some reason that is never mentioned in this docuseries.

Like Solomon Asch’s study of conformity at Swarthmore and Stanley Milgram’s obedience tests at Yale in the years before, Zimbardo’s work was used as a answer to the most baffling question of the 20th century: how could seemingly normal people embrace and participate in Nazism? Are individuals with free will really that malleable? Is it that easy to convince people to do something they know is wrong?

I can’t really answer that, but what I can tell you, after watching the three 45-minute episodes of this documentary, is that many of the methods used at Stanford were… unreliable at best. For years there have been debates about whether what Zimbardo did was ethical. But accusations from author and researcher (and the Frenchest man in the world) Thibault Le Texier suggest that Zimbardo deliberately misrepresented the experiment for his personal gain. And many of the “good guys” who participated in the study more than 50 years ago and who are interviewed in this new project agree.

This is certainly interesting, but Nat Geo’s program is unfortunately grim in its presentation of the lowest common denominator. It’s funny, because many commentators suggest that the footage of the experiment is a precursor to modern reality television. Yet Unlocking the truth has a similar grammar to an average episode of Real Housewives.

The first chapter simply tells the story of what happened, as we all know it. (By the way, there was a pretty good movie made in 2015 called The Stanford Prison Experiment with Billy Crudup, Ezra Miller, Tye Sheridan and others. A German version was published in 2001, The experimentwas more loosely based on the study, with a more violent “what if?” end.)

The second chapter is the “but wait!” where we rewind and hear all the secrets. Not only did the guards turn into monsters who made up their own rules, they were also coached. The infamous head security guard (“John Wayne”) wasn’t some skull-cracking demon, but a pot-smoking theater kid who did what he thought was asked of him. (In episode 1 we see his extravagant house and grin; in episode 2 we see him wearing slippers and singing in a Beatles cover band and realize he’s cold.) The prisoner who famously had a mental breakdown 36 hours into the experiment now swears he did it because he just wanted to quit his stupid summer job, and he was told it was the only way he could leave.

Everyone points the finger at Zimbardo, who enjoyed his experiment for decades, appearing in documentaries and publishing books. Zimbardo took advantage of the timing of the experiment just before the Attica prison riots, and he was eager to appear as a defense witness after Abu Ghraib, often doing his TV spots in a weird Superman-like shirt with a Z on top. By the end you’re pretty much convinced Zimbardo was a fraud.

Finally, in the third chapter, Zimbardo, who passed away a few weeks ago appears at the age of 92 to defend himself. He’s certainly smart and has had an interesting life, but he doesn’t really say anything. No one wants to say it, but the fact-versus-fiction about the Stanford Prison Experiment most likely comes “a little bit from column A, a little bit from column B.”

The series concludes with a “believe what you want to believe” recap, but not before our surviving guards and prisoners watch a recreation and take notes. This is meant to be cathartic, but it comes across as a shrug. We are never quite sure to what extent the experiment was a major life trauma for these men, or just a minor footnote. I’m sure there are great revelations about human behavior in this story, but this isn’t where you’ll find them.