‘Duck Dynasty: The Revival’ Review: Robertsons Reboot is boring

As he drives through Louisiana, Willie Robertson has some thoughts to share about the role he plays in his family. “They were actually like chickens, and they have one, you know, a chicken leader,” he says, starting. He seems to be boring, but the cameras are rolling and he must avoid dead air. “A leader of chickens. Someone who – if you can lead chickens, I don’t know if you can.”

You might think that bird metaphors would easily come for a man who made his fortune to sell duck hunt for falsification and to do this on TV. And yet little about the presence of Willie Robertson on A & E’s “Duck Dynasty: The Revival” seems simple at all. On a strange, tense and ultimately boring series, Willie-IMand with years of reality TV experience, after a Smash-hit First itteration of the series ran from 2012 to 2017 to stop something. What it is can scandalize part of the audience. But it is perhaps more interesting than to hear a man talking about how he looks a bit like the chicken leader of his family, who are a set of chickens himself.

Willie is now the leader not only of his brood, but of the series; His father, Phil Robertson, died on 25 May after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and no longer appears in the air, but for flashbacks to the first series. With his family, Willie lives in a Louisiana compound that is something of a living museum to commemorate the success of the Robertsons in both the Duck-Call production and entertainment industry. One storyline in the first episode of the Show contains Willie, frustrated that his adult daughter has redesigned elements of his office, entered the museum and set up a store that works in a replica office, one that is not designed to be used. For example, the chair is locked up in place so that attendees can get an idea of ​​how Willie’s workspace could be.

He does this work with a Gedempte Passive Aggression; The subtext of most of his interactions with his family is a calm annoyance that he is not detected. To point out that his office should not have been touched, he storms in the podcast recording of his daughter, staring at her and then storms away. But at least the younger generation is still malleable! Willie Babysit with his grandchildren, announces: “If you have to go to the bathroom, hold it. If you go, you just sit in it. Because I don’t change diapers.” When a child has time to cry, he explains: “If you will have that attitude in life, it will hurt you. Solve it now. Take it up, come over it, let’s continue.”

Elsewhere Willie’s wife, Korie, aspects of the Family Media Empire. They now produce films about the family’s own history. She takes fields from Willie’s Uncle, Si, in which he plays the hero. There seems to be no other subject that is worth making entertainment for the Robertsons than the Robertsons, who live as they do in an EPCOT version of their own house. The show, just like the family that describes it, is obsessed with reviving the past; Flashbacks to the original series take a “family guy” processing level of frequency and arbitrariness. That first show had a little life, but today the Robertsons miss the verve and playfulness that makes stars worth seeing. In one lurid order in which different members of Willie’s Children’s Generation participate in a PickleBall tournament, the young men try to transfer each other. They hit the ball in the net. “Nice shot in the net,” says another, quiet.

To be honest, all this feels sad. In the first iteration, “Duck Dynasty” was a determining show for his moment, part of a legacy of reality-Shows-as-Family Sitcoms that was more than, first, “the Osbournes” and “newlyweds: Nick and Jessica” and, ultimately, “Jon & Kate Plus 8” and “the Kardashians”. What all these shows shared was a feeling of the fireplace as the gathering place for mild jokes and cute antics with low bets. Little was put forward that could not be resolved by the time that the credits rolled – hence today, the Pickleball tournament, or an episode in which Willie decides to hunt Bigfoot. But what the Robertson family distinguished among their colleagues was their non-celebrity; From the flexively unkind beards of the men to the nature of how they earned their bread, the “Duck Dynasty” clan seemed to be calling back to a “Waltons” -Sque American Rural Paradise, ruled by deep love, respect and faith. Here form and function were united: they played the leading role in a family -sitcom of the kind that was popular at that time, we assume, much more on these lay people.

All this is political by nature. But the magic trick of “Duck Dynasty” was that it didn’t seem that way. This is evident from 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-viewed the current statements of American culture, now that somewhat picturesque-rusted on the assumption that one could see a show completely steeped in with the sensitivity of his star and completely blindly run away from his perspective on contemporary social issues. That Phil Robertson had retrograde beliefs was an indictment against “ducknynasty”; The fact that the show concentrated around his family life treated his worldview as one of uncomplicated family love was another.

To open the world of the show, a little viewers can shock. But at least it would be something. Recently, for example, ‘Paul American’, a show about the self-conscious provocative, Maga-Adjacent-Broers Logan and Jake Paul, now made a gross splash on the streamer now known as HBO Max. (Congratulations, Tony Soprano and Carrie Bradshaw – you hang around with the Pauls.) But this viewer walked away after a few episodes with a crystalline feeling of who the Pauls were. It was not a great TV. But it had the conditional satisfaction of reality.

Not everything has to be about politics; Willie himself knows this! (He stayed out of the 2024 race, after he had previously approved Donald Trump in 2016, to keep the focus on a book he wrote about the Bible. He has transferred this message In an interview with Tucker Carlson.) But a family whose head of the household is emphasizing empire to toddler-reinforced children because they are not acting properly, it can be said that it is controlled by a certain system of beliefs, one that the reality-sitcom may not be the best way to investigate.

Not that the Robertsons mainly give. According to their chicken leader, they did not make meaningful efforts to open or share something about themselves, so that a non -ethnic viewer could understand why they dominated exactly American culture so thoroughly for a lot of years. It is as if they believe that celebrity is their birthright, and maybe it is that; Their new show exists, just like their house, to commemorate how well they became famous, and little else about who the Robertsons are or what they believe.

“Duck Dynasty: The Revival” will premiere on Sunday 1 June on A&E at 9 p.m. et/pt.