Duck Dynasty attracted over 8 million viewers in their Season 3 premiere, which makes it the most watched show on the A&E cable network. The ratings for last week showed only Walking Dead and The Bible with a higher rating than the show about the Robinson clan from Louisiana.
Phil Robertson who created the Duck Commander duck call played football at La. Tech and started ahead of Terry Bradshaw who went on to win several Super Bowls and was voted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Robertson turned down a chance to go to the pros, because it interfered with duck season.
This article from ABC News tells more about the Robertson family and how they created a duck call business, with sales in the millions.
The Robertson family is holding out for $200,000 an episode of the reality show. A&E is currently filming about 15 episodes a season, which would mean A&E would have to pay the Robertson family $3 million a season.
A&E is caught in a bad place. They surely don’t want to pay the family $3 million a season, but on the other hand they don’t want to lose their most watched television program. The Robertson family is in a win-win situation, since even if they get $100,000 an episode they will make $1.5 million. There were two complete seasons filmed last year, so the Robertson family would make $6 million if they get the $200,000 episode that they want and $3 million if they get $100,000 an episode.
The show is a show that the family can watch, in that they don’t have any profanity on the shows and the family was angered by A&E inserting bleeps in the earlier seasons, so it would look like the family was using bad language.
I had never seen a Duck Dynasty show before this week and can see why the show is so popular. Best of all it is filmed in West Monroe, Louisiana, where we lived from 1974-1976.
It is almost a given, that A&E and the Robertson family will work out an agreement, on their pay per episode in Season 4, since A&E doesn’t want to lose this gold mine of a show.
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