On Jan. 20, Donald J. 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 official 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 glaringly declare that the times had a-changed back.
“Duck Dynasty” actually aired primarily during the Obama era, with 11 seasons beginning in 2012, and it was never overtly about politics onscreen. (Offscreen 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 President 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 seasons 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” 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 on May 25 at 79.) Orbiting them were an assortment of bemused wives, cute kids and oddball neighbors and relations, like the gonzo philosopher Uncle Si.
“Duck Dynasty” was a simple entertainment, but it was also a complicated mash-up of several of the most popular TV genres of its time. It had some connection to “hicksploitation” reality shows like “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” and to series like “Deadliest Catch” that celebrated people who worked with their hands.
It also had the structure and beats of a mockumentary sitcom. Like “Modern Family,” it often ended with voice-overs summing up the episode’s themes and lessons. (There’s even a special “The family goes to Hawaii” episode.) Like “The Office,” it structured stories around staffers goofing around the warehouse and cooking up schemes like flooding the loading dock to create a duck pond.
But there was a key difference between it and the network comedies set in bougie Los Angeles or a Rust Belt corporate office. It was about work, family and faith — a typical episode would close with a prayer over a meal — offering representation for the sort of region that had been largely ignored by the networks since the “rural purge” removed TV’s once-popular rustic sitcoms from the air in the early 1970s.
“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.)
Instead, there was a savviness to how the Robertsons played with their caricatures and managed their screen images. (After the Robertson men became famous as bearded icons of country living, pre-TV photos emerged of them as clean-shaven as catalog models.) They were the jokers more than the butt of the joke. If they were laughing at themselves, they did so all the way to the bank.
“Duck Dynasty” was more than wish-fulfillment about money. It was, in some ways, a fantasy of work-life balance: of being prosperous, getting business done, but always having time for hunting and fishing and your kids.
Even more, it was about the dream of striking it rich where you live — where your parents lived, and your grandparents — without having to move or adopt the alienating mores and language of another culture. You would remain yourself, with your familiar lifestyle but better stuff.
“Money didn’t change some things,” Willie says in the pilot. “We still manage to stay true to ourselves.”
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.
That campaign was also an appeal to the past, albeit with a less upbeat spirit than “Duck Dynasty” exuded. Over and over in his speeches, Donald Trump valorized “the old days” when the country was “strong” and its men unconstrained. He promised voters in pockets of the country like rural Louisiana to restore the rich and meaningful lifestyle of their ancestors, even if the memories of those old times were airbrushed by nostalgia.
“Duck Dynasty” was in its jokey way an early variation on a theme that the more serious cable hit “Yellowstone” would later expand on: the ways in which wealth, authenticity and identity derive from connection to one’s land. It also anticipated the cultural messaging of second-generation MAGA figures like JD Vance — known first as the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” — who in his vice-presidential acceptance speech argued that the bond of soil matters more than ideals: “People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.”
Eventually, “Duck Dynasty” embraced its political moment, at least offscreen. Phil — who was restored to the series shortly after his suspension — endorsed and went duck hunting with Senator Ted Cruz. Willie spoke in support of Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. (The family, reportedly, was divided on his decision.) And if you thought at the time that giving a speaking slot to an A&E reality-show star was a symbol of a shambolic campaign that couldn’t attract real celebrities, well, in November the joke was on you.
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.
The graying beards are not the only things that have changed. The new episodes are an hour long, which fiddles with the original’s snappy half-hour pacing. The Duck Commander warehouse now includes a Robertson family museum, with a replica of Willie’s office and a gift shop run by his daughter Bella. In the new version of the series, the company Willie runs now looks less like a duck-call business that also makes media and more like a media business that also makes duck calls.
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 the 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.
With the new season’s focus on generational change comes more screen time for the younger relations. There are a lot of them — Willie and Korie’s kids, their spouses, their own kids, all living side-by-side on the family compound.
This adds another layer of wish-fulfillment: the dream of having family close by, everyone working and prospering with plenty of free child care. (There has long been a pronatalist streak in cable reality TV — all those great big broods on the TLC channel — that vibes with the current conservative social-political push toward encouraging bigger families.)
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. Willie takes his grown children on a duck-hunting expedition; they’re more interested in taking selfies. It’s another sitcom setup executed to formula. When Willie’s son John Luke — who runs a coffee roaster business from the warehouse — proves more interested in fancy brewing equipment than in hunting gear, Willie tells him, “I need your A game, not your latte game.”
But there’s also an undercurrent here that connects with and complicates the original series’s focus on preserving old ways in a new world. Once Willie was the new blood, adapting his father’s hunting business for an era of brand expansion, despite Phil’s occasional grousing.
Now he’s the graybeard — or at least the salt-and-pepper beard — wondering if his business is becoming denatured, even feminized. (There’s a scene in which he is chagrined to find his office remodeled by his daughter as, in his words, “a woman office.”) He’s the one worrying: Will my children care about what I care about? Will they carry forward what connects me with my past?
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 President Trump’s victory). On the podcast “WHOA That’s Good,” Willie’s daughter Sadie Robertson Huff — who like her father has endorsed President Trump — discusses topics like “How to Read the Bible” and “What Makes a ‘Good’ Wife.”
Even if Willie doesn’t say it, his children’s digital-nativeness may well make them a better fit both for the times and for a family business that is about celebrity as much as anything. “Duck Dynasty” was originally the story of a family that turned a concrete, real-world business into TV stardom. In today’s environment, fame is often the original product itself — see “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” a very different reality show about faith and subculture that began with its stars’ notoriety on TikTok.
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 is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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