Sociometric panel show

I've seen a few different panel and debate shows and I've always thought it's a real shame that the people are arranged in such an uninteresting way. John Oliver famously held a proportional debate on climate change with 97 people on one side and 3 on the other. Obviously, that was a shambles to make a point, but I think there could be a useful and interesting format hidden under the guise of comedy.

A while back I learned about sociometric games, where you get people to represent their relationships with each other using dimensions in physical space. It's a lot of fun to get people to run around and stand where they were born on an invisible room-sized map, and you often learn some surprising things too (the birthday paradox works in space as well as time).

Anyway, my idea is this: why not make a sociometric panel show? As John Oliver did, get a roughly representative group of people (though maybe not quite so many) and lay them out in a space according to some axis of their beliefs. Then you can see the clusters of agreement laid out physically, interview whole groups at a time, and maybe even - on rare occasion - see someone adjust their beliefs and move to a different spot.

Ideally that would get you the best of both worlds: fringe viewpoints would be represented, but clearly identified as fringe by the small number of people supporting them. Mainstream viewpoints would get less time per person (if interviewed in groups) but seem more authoritative by weight of numbers.

Of course, it'd be a lot of work to make sure it runs smoothly. The lighting and camera setup would be very tricky. And most importantly you'd have to be very careful to avoid a Robbers Cave type situation. The last thing anyone wants to see on TV is people with different opinions fighting each other.