The Monastery (TV series)

The Monastery is a series of reality television programmes originally made in the United Kingdom in 2005. The format involves a number of individuals, who are not necessarily religious, spending a period of time in a place of religious retreat. It has since been copied for UK sequels and in the United States and Australia.

United Kingdom

The UK series The Monastery was produced by Tiger Aspect for the BBC, and filmed at Worth Abbey. It was first transmitted in May 2005.

People

; The Abbot
;The laymen

Reception and sequels

The Monastery won the Merit Award for Religious Programming in the Sandford St. Martin Trust Awards in 2006. The series was re-broadcast by other television networks.
The BBC commissioned a follow-up episode, The Monastery Revisited, broadcast in June 2006; this was immediately followed by a four-episode series, The Convent, in which four women spent 40 days in a convent of the Poor Clares at Arundel; and The Retreat in 2007, in which a group of men and women lived together in a Muslim school of prayer.

United States

The US version, also called The Monastery, was made by the Discovery Channel and broadcast on TLC. It debuted on 22 October 2006 and aired on Sundays at 10:00 pm. In the first season, five men of various backgrounds who were facing personal crises volunteered to live at a Benedictine monastery, the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in northern New Mexico, for 40 days. There was also a series made at Our Lady of the Mississippi Abbey in Iowa, but it was never broadcast.

Australia

ABC in Australia made a similar series, The Abbey, in which five women spent 33 days living the life of an enclosed Benedictine nun.