Just when you thought reality TV couldn’t get any worse, Netflix released Unlocked: A Jail Experiment. Given the cultural obsession with fetishizing trauma and carcerality for entertainment, I was of course disturbed but not surprised that this show has repeatedly ranked in the Global Top Ten of most-watched TV. Since I’ve elsewhere written about how purportedly progressive critiques of the carceral state rehearse the logics that normalize the prison as an inevitable feature of modern life, and in so doing bolster incapacitation as a catch-all solution to complex problems, I was regrettably curious about the obvious ironies of a reality TV show staged as a forward-thinking social experiment. I knew it would be really hard to watch just one episode, but I did, because… IDK. Sometimes I make mistakes. In order to stomach it, I partook in cannabis because, well, I live in California and have been diagnosed with a lot of fun acronyms like GAD, ADHD, and PTSD. If you’ve been curious about the show from the standpoint of critique but don’t want to watch the damn thing, below are the delightfully unhinged, unedited, and uncensored notes I took when I was stoned for your amusement…
This is Horrorifying
^weed thoughts and spelling
I made it past the opening credits barely and then it was only 2:39 in. That was such a long time. My face is staring at the screen like I smell cat poop.
The writing is so bad! They repeat “he’s willing to bet his reputation on it” twice in one convoluted run-on sentence at the beginning of the show. It’s the hook?
I almost stopped watching at 2:41 when the narrator started talking like a fucking nature documentarian. Visually, sonically, and verbally the “criminal”/people divide (reinforced by liberal “prisoners are people too” hogwash) is reinforced at every turn—the humanitarian hinge of modern empire. Appealing to the white gaze is spiritually void. Recognizing basic humanity is not a moral quandary. Likening incarcerated people to animals as a main aesthetic and narrative trope is, however, in need of ethical inquiry. Spectacularizing trauma while simultaneously trivializing it as Darwinian law. I can’t.
The pet store incident. Holy shit. At least an iguana has never bitten your methed out dick off while you’re being strangled by another reptile as you run from the cops with a pillowcase full of snakes, prob also on meth? You know. We’ve all been there though. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
That generically hot twenty-one year old deputy is totally a hired actor; she looks like she’s reading from a teleprompter. Oh my god they are all hot. With immaculate makeup and their lashes done. The fancy delicate ones that never look like half a feathery Pringle. This is suspicious. Life isn’t the Spice Girls. This isn’t a strip club. A strip club is Marxist by comparison to this captive reality TV racial capitalist hellscape.
Oh now they’re doing Wild West theme. Jesus. I have to watch 21 more minutes of this. Did they just never decide on a particular aesthetic of sensationalized suffering, so they invoke them all? And when did Tyler’s hair get a blowout?
Oh god the coerced applause. Captain saves the day with his wild and dangerous ideas to be tested on wild and dangerous men. [in Animal Planet voice:] But in the wild, prey rarely survive predators. And predators love using reality television to launch their re-election campaigns. Was this study submitted for IRB approval?
Now we’re in Blaxploitation theme.
Did Quentin Tarantino direct this?
