Actual nuns disliked the show . . .

Funny it should be 'blacklisted' by your bishop, since the National Catholic Office for Radio and Television were the technical consultants for the program.

Of course, the show doesn't show a realistic view of religious life. For example, the Reverend Mother allowing a novice to decide for herself whether to fly around whenever she pleased 'as a matter of conscience' is rather absurd. Surely she would not leave the convent without permission - on foot or in flight. Or Sister Bertrille accepting a bunch of gifts from an old boyfriend and the Reverend Mother knows nothing about it? A sports car arrives for one of the novices and Sr. Bertrille has to decide for herself what to do with it? Come on!

Maybe that's why some of the sisters (nuns are actually cloistered; Sister Bertrille is a religious sister, not a nun) in your school didn't like it: it wasn't realistic. People generally can get pretty exercised about a TV show or movie that's supposed to be about 'them' and doesn't reflect the reality of how they live or what they believe or do - whether it's race, religion or job. So the sisters at your school would quite naturally have been the harshest critics of such a program, just as police officers are the harshest critics of cop shows, and doctors are the harshest critics of hospital dramas.

There were atheists then in the 1960s, as always. Madelyn Murray O'Hair was already starting her attacks on organized religion [she also called this tv show "stupid" once]. And Dr Richard Dawkins was doing his masters in biology in Cambridge then, and Christopher Hitchens was entering Oxford as a bachelor student. Only Soviet Union, now Russia, and Mao's China there was an open persecution against organized religion. Here in the USA people still tended to respect organized religion and not question it as we do now.