Season 6 of the A&E reality hit premiered Wednesday night, drawing significantly fewer viewers than the Season 5 premiere in January.However, the show still remains the number one cable show on Wednesday night.
Wednesday's “Duck Dynasty” premiere drew 4.6 million total viewers — nearly 4 million less than the 8.5 million who tuned in for the Season 5 premiere.
The slide continues a sharp downward trajectory for the show. The 8.5 million who tuned in for the Season 5 premiere was itself a dramatic drop from the 11.8 million total viewers who tuned in for the Season 4 premiere in August 2013. Granted, the Season 4 premiere set a record for the series, but still — those are pretty big back-to-back declines.
Wednesday night's numbers are also a drop from the Season 5 finale in March, which had 6 million total viewers.
Wednesday night's premiere featured a special guest appearance by Louisiana Gov .Bobby Jindal, who awarded Willie Robertson the inaugural Governor's Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence for his success in making the Duck Commander family business a multi-million dollar company.
"It was really neat to have the governor on our show," Willie Robertson told The Daily Advertiser. "His family loves watching the show, and they all came up to West Monroe to participate."
Jindal's guest appearance evidently did not do much to help the show salvage its declining ratings. Although many media outlets are blaming the drop in ratings over controversial statements Phil Robertson made to GQ Magazine last December, others argue that "Duck Dynasty" is simply following the usual, short lifespan of docusoaps.
"Critics and ratings-gazers will be quick to attribute Duck Dynasty's fall from grace to any number of factors -- one of them obviously being star Phil Robertson's controversial persona in the wake of anti-gay comments made in a GQ profile -- but the fact of the matter remains that docusoaps have a short lifespan. And A&E has already milked more out of Duck Dynasty than anybody could have imagined," wrote Michael O'Connor for The Hollywood Reporter.
