TLC's "The Monastery": A Look into the Cloisters

The Learning Channel’s new series “The Monastery” is, in a way, a little like a reflection of some of its characters, who stand on the edge between Christianity and… well, anything ranging from fearful doubt to agnosticism.

It can’t decide what it wants to be.

The title, the graphics in the opening sequence and preceding each commercial break, the catchy tense phrases uttered to hook viewers before said breaks… it’s all meant to suggest a reality TV series of the sort where we would expect one monk-in-training to be voted off each week. But what TLC has on its hands is a slow-moving documentary series edited into reality television, right down to the time-lapse footage of clouds streaking across the sky for no particular reason.

(To be fair, the photography of the blue skies of New Mexico is quite breathtaking.)

The story: five troubled men commit to a Benedictine monastery for forty days, a life of constant group prayer, long silent patches and total introspection. As one might imagine, this lifestyle limits visual variety, and the eerie rhythms of monastic life—returning over and over again to the chapel to chant—create a hypnotic effect.

Some of these men are clearly more troubled than others, and the show quickly picks its ‘stars’. Things balance out more over time over the course of “The Monastery”, but it grows odd to watch the program seeing little of half the cast. Most conspicuous by his absence is a young man advertised as a former Satanist, whose flirtation with Satanism gets more air time in the opening titles than in any of the content of the episodes.