On Jan. 20, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. Two days later, A&E network announced that it had ordered 20 new episodes of its hit 2010s reality comedy “Duck Dynasty,” titled “Duck Dynasty: The Revival.”
The network, in its statement, did not connect the second restoration to the first. But short of ABC’s bringing Roseanne Barr’s character back from the dead to head the “Roseanne” revival, “The Conners,” it is hard to imagine another programming decision that would so clearly declare that the times had a-changed back.
“Duck Dynasty” actually aired primarily during the Obama era, with 11 ӽ紫ýs beginning in 2012, and it was never overtly about politics on-screen. (Off-screen was another story; we’ll get to that.) Focused on the Robertson family of Louisiana, who made their fortune with the Duck Commander duck-call business before becoming reality stars, the series was first and above all a lighthearted family TV show.
But “Duck Dynasty” was also in many ways a precursor of the conservative identity politics that would sweep in after it. It was filled with cultural signifiers — beards, Bibles and buckshot — that spoke to the authenticity of rural life and the reverence for heritage. It became the focus of a controversy that previewed how central grievances over “wokeness” and “cancellation” would become to conservative politics.
And it was a mass-market hit that found an audience by representing a kind of life — traditionalist, openly Christian, country — that was absent from much pop culture.
The original series went off the air in 2017, months after Trump’s first swearing-in. It was most likely the victim less of social forces than of the mundane TV problem of overexposure: It cranked out 131 episodes and 11 ӽ紫ýs in five years, and the ratings had dived.
Given its timing, the return of the Robertsons to TV feels like a restoration parallel to the one in Washington, a second term picking up where the first left off. But nothing really returns unchanged. The new “Duck Dynasty,” which premiered June 1, wants to bring back the old fun, and to some extent it does. But it is also, in its lighthearted, “Happy, happy, happy” way, reckoning with what celebrity has made of it, how time has changed it and where a new generation of leadership might take a brand — and a show — built on nostalgia for the old days.
The secret to the original “Duck Dynasty” is that despite being nominally a reality show, it was really a sitcom. It had the stagy zingers, setups and wacky side quests of a scripted, laugh-tracked network half-hour.
The Robertsons called the approach “guided reality”; producers suggested scenarios and the cast ran with them, being themselves but performatively. Practical jokes were played; shenanigans were had. It was cheerful, countrified escapism with all the heft of a balsa-wood decoy.
It had one foot planted in the present, represented by Willie Robertson, the Duck Commander chief executive, who worked to modernize and expand the business. But it had another plunged deep in the swampy past, personified by Willie’s father, Phil, the wizened company founder, with his folksy, unreconstructed opinions on marriage, manhood and religion. (Phil died May 25 at 79.) Orbiting them were an assortment of bemused wives, cute kids and oddball neighbors and relations, like gonzo philosopher Uncle Si.
“Duck Dynasty” was both a fantasy of wealth and a fantasy of rural working-class life. It was not simply some “Beverly Hillbillies” cartoon of shooting up the woods and cooking up varmints — though there was an element of that. (You do not have to watch the series long before you see a squirrel in a stew pot.)
Unlike Jed Clampett, the Robertsons were not fish out of water. They remained firmly in their swamp, and the world would come to them. Sometimes it would send a helicopter.
“Duck Dynasty” was affectionate for backwoods ways and tradition, but it could complicate its nostalgia. It gave the patriarch Phil plenty of airtime to sermonize about manhood and encourage his grandsons to marry “a meek, gentle, kind-spirited country girl.” But characters like Willie’s wife, Korie, would push back, patiently, on things like his saying that cooking was for women or “girlie men.”
Phil’s opinions came out more blatantly and less telegenically, however, in a 2013 GQ interview, in which he called gay sex a sin and insisted that southern Black farm laborers were happy in Jim Crow-era Louisiana. Amid the blowback, A&E suspended him from the series.
The punishment seemed, at the time, like the affirmation of a new cultural order. It was 2013, for heaven’s sake! Barack Obama had been elected to a second term after announcing his support for same-sex marriage, which would soon become legal nationwide. Conservatives complained about the suspension, but broadly, talk like Phil’s was of the past. You needed to recognize this, and grow, and change, or be left behind.
Except … maybe you didn’t. The Trump 2016 campaign was in many ways a successful appeal to voters like Phil Robertson, who believed that their views were being silenced, their icons canceled, their traditions trampled, their beliefs insulted.
In the new “duck dynasty,” as in so many revivals, the co-star is time. Willie is old now — at least, for story purposes, he is feeling old. He’s a middle-aged man caught in the sandwich of peak work responsibility and filial obligations. (Phil does not appear in the revival, though his diagnosis with early-stage Alzheimer’s is mentioned in the first episode.) He is considering “fully semi-retiring” and contemplating his eventual replacement as chief executive: his duckcession, as it were.
If “Duck Dynasty” was about the Robertson family business, “The Revival” is about the business of being the Robertsons. In the original series pilot, for instance, Willie resented having to make time to work on a cooking video for his mother, Kay. Now, touring the warehouse, we find him shuttling from podcast studio to podcast studio. The family has produced several podcasts, even as “Duck Dynasty” has been off the air, the material ranging from comedy to Christianity to politics.
Here, too, you can see a parallel to a larger cultural and media shift. In 2016, the Trump campaign collected the endorsement of reality-TV star Willie Robertson; in 2024, it went all-in on podcast hosts. You also get a sense of how times have changed, even if “Duck Dynasty” tries not to. In 2012, after all, the show stood out as the gentle-rebel-yell counterprogramming to an era of liberal politics and blue-state broadcasting. Now, it’s just one more branch of a burgeoning sector of traditionalist, MAGA-coded media.
The first episode finds Willie deciding to try to find his successor through a series of tests and contests, which sets up a string of screwball generation-gap scenarios.
It’s no spoiler to say that the first episode of “Duck Dynasty: The Revival” resolves this worry neatly and reassuringly, as Willie decides that it’s OK if his children don’t grow up to be just like him.
It’s also no spoiler to say that the kids, however much time they spend posting to Instagram, are really an extension of a multigenerational brand of family and faith. On the “Unashamed With the Robertson Family” podcast, the older generations espouse Christianity (and, on the episode after the 2024 election, saluted Trump’s victory).
For “Duck Dynasty” and Duck Commander, what started out with duck calls is now an empire of branding and cultural signifying. But both businesses operate on the same principle: You make a noise, and you get a response.
James Poniewozik, chief television critic for The New York Times, has been writing about the connections among pop culture, politics and history since the 1990s.
