Should You Spend A Discernment With The Sisterhood: Becoming Nuns?

What Is This Thing?

Before Catholic women make the final decision to take Holy Orders and become nuns, they go through a period known as "discernment," in which they try out full-time spiritual life for a while to decide whether they're ready to commit. This show follows five women going through their vocational discernment, initially at a convent in upstate New York and apparently with other communities as the season goes on.

When Is It On?

Tuesdays at 10 PM on Lifetime.

Why Was It Made Now?

Lifetime is still Television For Women, and a show about women deciding whether to live the rest of their lives in communities of women is about as "Women" as you can get. (I also wondered whether there might be a Catholic development executive at Lifetime who came up with this idea and/or pushed it through to help expiate her guilt about misogynist shows like Dance Moms. EP names like Mary Donahue and Colleen Conway Grogan suggest that I was almost right, except that there were actually two.)

What's Its Pedigree?

Sr. Cyril formerly competed in Season 8 of Dancing With The Stars, and...just kidding! Hot Snakes Media (guys, really? with that name?) is also the outfit behind Breaking Amish, Amish Mafia, and some other shows I've never heard of.

...And?

Even the most lapsed of lapsed Catholics (hi) will agree that nuns are pretty much the coolest people in the church; they have a strong social-justice tradition, they tend to advocate progressive changes in church institutions. And judging by the first episode, the nuns in The Sisterhood are pretty bad-ass too; any one of their talking heads is more compelling than anything the nunettes has to say. They all seem so warm and gentle and loving and happy that watching them feels very meditative.

It's also compelling to me, as always, to get a look inside an unfamiliar world. I had never heard of discernment, and I'm interested to see how restrictive this period will be on the young women and how well they take it, particularly given how they reacted to losing their makeup and phones.

Also? The show's starting out strong with the reality-show staple of including a participant the viewer can love to hate. HI, CLAIRE! ...Okay, "hate" is a very strong word, especially under the circumstances. But she could maybe cool it on the judgment of her fellow would-be postulants and whether their responses to their first hours at the convent are intellectually mature enough to meet her personal standards. (Although hearing both Christie AND Stacey describing Jesus as their hot boyfriend puts me a little on Claire's side. Ladies, you can be a Bride of Christ but I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean you're supposed to be literally horny for him.)

...But?

It's slightly disorienting to see the tropes Lifetime previously used on, like, Preacher's Daughters to portray women deciding whether to devote their lives to religious service and celibacy, particularly since a discerning (heh) viewer is accustomed to turning a jaundiced eye to this kind of shooting and editing with the assumption that it's all fake. All this is by way of saying, at this very early stage, I feel pretty sure that the girl who CURRENTLY HAS A BOYFRIEND may be in this just to get on TV. Francesca also seems like she might have been as happy to have done Season 2 of Princesses: Long Island as this thing.

Speaking of fake, if they made such a big deal of making the girls take their makeup off, then how come they were all definitely at LEAST wearing mascara at church on their first full day? And why hasn't Eseni had to denude and more to the point CUT those nails?

...So?

The nuns really are fun to watch, and I actually don't care how fake it is: I have to see how this ends.