Before Duck Dynasty became an A&E ratings juggernaut the Robertson family had been the subject of a television docudrama before. The Outdoor Channel followed the clan in a one season show they called Duck Commander, which set the table for the wacky shenanigans of the family well before Duck Dynasty would seemingly fuel the “redneck renaissance” of basic cable programming.
Duck Commander is a variant on their more successful show as it doesn’t have the slick production values A&E would bring, and obviously not the similar levels of fame, but it gives us an insight into what the family’s shenanigans would look like. We get introduced to the same people, and same business, that Duck Dynasty would make famous but this is a much simpler kind of show than Dynasty would evolve into.
This has the same sort of pratfalls, et al, but this is without the same sort of pseudo-fictional revelry the gang enjoys with A&E. There’s still the sort of shenanigans going on that happen with the current version of the show but there’s a lot less contrivance to it. It’s still made up for the show, of course, but this was before the fame of reality TV really set in. Thus it’s basically a family messing around on television without the knowledge that millions of people are going to be watching this, and that a chunk of their income is going to come from the ancillary crap that gets sold with their name on it.
The show, while admittedly as awful as their current series, at least feels interesting because this was before they became a commercial product on television to hawk their wares. This was just a wacky family appealing to their core audience, hunters and outdoors types, and gets you an insight into what they could become.
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A&E presents Duck Commander: Before the Dynasty. Run Time: 198 minutes Not Rated. Released on DVD: 1.13.15
