1 day ago
1
While driving around Louisiana, Willie Robertson has some thoughts to share about the role he plays in his family. “They were basically like chickens, and they need a, you know, a chicken leader,” he says, beginning to trail off. He seems to be boring himself, but the cameras are rolling, and he needs to avoid dead air. “A leader of chickens. Someone who — if you can lead chickens, I don’t know if you can.”
One might think avian metaphors would come easily to a man who’s made his fortune selling duck-hunting accoutrements, and doing so on TV at that. And yet little about Willie Robertson’s presence on A&E’s “Duck Dynasty: The Revival” seems easy at all. On a strange, strained and ultimately boring series, Willie — someone with years of reality-TV experience, after a smash-hit first iteration of the series ran from 2012 to 2017 — seems to be holding something back. What it is might scandalize some segment of the audience. But it might be more interesting than hearing a guy talk about how he’s kind of like the chicken leader of his family, who are themselves a bunch of chickens.
Willie is now the leader not merely of his brood but of the series; his father, Phil Robertson, died on May 25 after having been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and no longer appears on air, but for flashbacks to the first series. With his family, Willie lives in a Louisiana compound that is something of a living museum commemorating the Robertsons’ success in both the duck-call-manufacturing and entertainment industries. One plotline in the show’s first episode features Willie, frustrated that his adult daughter redecorated elements of his office, walking into the museum and setting up shop working at a replica office, one that’s not designed to be used. The chair, for instance, is locked in place so that attendees can get a sense of what Willie’s workspace might be like.
He does this work with a muted passive-aggression; the subtext of most of his interactions with his family is a quiet annoyance that he is not being heeded. In order to make the point that his office should not have been touched, he storms into his daughter’s podcast recording, stares at her, then storms away. But at least the younger generation is still malleable! Babysitting his grandchildren, Willie announces, “If you gotta go to the bathroom, hold it. If you go, you’re just going to sit in it. Because I’m not changing diapers.” When one child has the temerity to cry, he declares “If you’re going to have that attitude in life, it’s going to hurt you. Fix it right now. Deal with it, get over it, let’s move on.”
Elsewhere, Willie’s wife, Korie, is handling aspects of the family media empire. They are now producing movies, ones about the family’s own history. She takes pitches from Willie’s uncle, Si, in which he plays the hero. There seems to be no other topic worth making entertainment about for the Robertsons than the Robertsons, living as they do in an EPCOT version of their own home. The show, like the family it chronicles, is obsessed with reliving the past; flashbacks to the original series take on a “Family Guy”-cutaway level of frequency and randomness. That first show had a bit of life to it, but, today, the Robertsons lack the verve and playfulness that makes stars worth watching. In one lugubrious sequence in which various members of Willie’s children’s generation take part in a pickleball tournament, the young men attempt to trash-talk one another. One hits the ball into the net. “Nice shot in the net,” another says, haltingly.
All of this feels, frankly, sad. In its first iteration, “Duck Dynasty” was a defining show for its moment, part of a legacy of reality shows-as-family sitcoms that was capacious enough to include, first, “The Osbournes” and “Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica,” and, eventually, “Jon & Kate Plus 8” and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” What these shows all shared was a sense of the hearth as the staging ground for mild pranks and cute, low-stakes antics. Little was put forward that couldn’t be resolved by the time the credits rolled — hence, today, the pickleball tournament, or an episode in which Willie decides to hunt for Bigfoot. But what set the Robertson family apart among their peers was their un-celebrity; from the ostentatiously ungroomed beards on the men to the very nature of how they made their living, the “Duck Dynasty” clan seemed to call back to a “Waltons”-esque American rural paradise, governed by deep love, respect and faith. Here, form and function were unified: They were starring in a family sitcom of the sort that was popular when families, we imagine, looked a lot more like this one.
All of this is, by its nature, political. But the magic trick of “Duck Dynasty” was that it didn’t seem so. That’s evidenced by the 2014 scandal in which Phil Robertson, the patriarch of the family, was suspended from the series after making homophobic comments in a GQ story. The incident — given the current say-everything state of American culture, now somewhat quaint — rested on the assumption that one could watch a show entirely imbued with the sensibility of its star and walk away entirely blind to his perspective on contemporary social issues. That Phil Robertson held retrograde beliefs was one indictment of “Duck Dynasty”; that the show centered around his family life treated his worldview as one of uncomplicated family love was another still.
To open up the show’s world a bit might shock viewers. But it would at least be something. Recently, for instance, “Paul American,” a show about the self-consciously provocative, MAGA-adjacent brothers Logan and Jake Paul, made a crass splash onto the streamer now once again known as HBO Max. (Congratulations, Tony Soprano and Carrie Bradshaw — you’re hanging out with the Pauls.) But this viewer walked away after a few episodes with a crystalline sense of who the Pauls were. It wasn’t great TV. But it had the conditional satisfactions of reality.
Not everything needs to be about politics; Willie himself knows this! (He stayed out of the 2024 race, after having previously endorsed Donald Trump in 2016, so as to keep the focus on a book he wrote about the Bible. He conveyed this message in an interview with Tucker Carlson.) But a family whose head of household imperiously snaps at toddler-aged children for not acting right might be said to be governed by a particular system of beliefs, one that the reality-sitcom might not be the best way to examine.
Not that the Robertsons particularly care. Following their chicken leader, they put no meaningful effort into opening up or sharing anything about themselves that might make an uninitiated viewer understand why, exactly, they dominated American culture so thoroughly for a stretch of years. It’s as though they believe celebrity is their birthright, and perhaps it is; their new show, like their house, exists to commemorate just how well they did becoming famous, and little else about who the Robertsons are or what they believe.
“Duck Dynasty: The Revival” will premiere on Sunday, June 1 on A&E at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
English (US) ·