The alpha male era is on its way out

A month ago, the extremely online couldn’t get enough of pondering the hypothetical match-up between 100 men and one gorilla. Although most who semi-seriously engaged with this thought experiment recognized it to be farce — Lord, we hope they did – others treated the fantasy wrestling match seriously. News outlets consulted with conservationists and primatologists, who provided their scientific assessments of the odds. (In summary, gorillas are powerful but not aggressive. They’re also endangered, you fools. Please donate to conservation efforts.)

Influencers weighed in. On X, YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, jokingly solicited 100 volunteers to “test this,” to which Elon Musk replied with a “Sure, what’s the worst that could happen?” The official White House account rode the virality to post a meme casting Donald Trump as some version of a mighty King Kong who deported “142,000+ illegal alien criminals.”

Only John Mulaney treated the argument with the flippancy that it merits. Four weeks ago, the “Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney” host pitched a match-up between himself, a 6’1”, 42-year-old comedian, and three teenagers.

John Mulaney, Sean Penn and Richard Kind on “Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney” (Adam Rose/Netflix)

Last week’s season finale closed with the highly anticipated (to use that term loosely) match-up. “All you at home, all you’ve done is talk, talk, talk,” Mulaney says. “It’s time to end the smack talk, end the conjecture and settle this — man to boy.”  

As one might have predicted, the trio of 14-year-old supposedly truant adolescents quickly overwhelmed the comic. But had Mulaney placed himself in the gorilla’s corner or the teenagers? According to the World Wildlife Fund, the average silverback gorilla weighs around 30 stone or 420 pounds; the kids weighed in at a combined 477 pounds. Jake Paul, who pretended to face off with a gorilla in an idiotic Instagram post, should take note. 

Inserting reality into this conceit was never the point, in the same way that the true opponents in this hypothetical contest are certain types of men battling their insecurities. Either way, its popularity reminds us that the right-wing-generated masculinity crisis is in full flower. Welcome to the Manly Man Show. Please note that we are joining a broadcast already in progress.

Sunday, June 1, marks the premiere of “Duck Dynasty: The Revival,” centering Duck Commander CEO Willie Robertson as the patriarch in a “guided reality” series about his family’s hunting gear empire. The revival follows Willie’s quest to find the next generation’s company leader – which is to say, the next him.

The ongoing joke is that Willie’s wife Korie is the one who knows what’s happening day to day while he’s largely clueless.

The “Duck Dynasty” revival is part of a fresh wave of mainstream conservative-skewing TV series. Take the success of Tim Allen’s midseason return in ABC’s “Shifting Gears.” The sitcom follows a signature of Allen’s, casting him as a grumpy widower who welcomes his estranged daughter (Kat Dennings) and her kids back into his life.

Like “Duck Dynasty: The Revival,” “Shifting Gears” peddles middle-of-the-road humor while reflecting right-leaning cultural sensibilities about men and women. The show has found its audience, ending its first season as ABC’s top-rated half-hour comedy, averaging 11.1 million viewers, according to Nielsen’s first full-season ranking of broadcast networks based on 35-day multiplatform viewing, shared by TVLine.

(Bryan Tarnowski)

Compared to most conservative-skewing programming, “Duck Dynasty: The Revival” is gentle, even taking into account the hints at waterfowl murder. On the other end of the spectrum crouches The Liver King, the subject of a recently debuted episode of Netflix’s “Untold” sports documentary series.

Said King, whose real name is Brian Johnson, is a massively muscled fitness influencer who built a nine-figure supplement company by promoting what he describes as an “ancestral lifestyle” revolving around ingesting raw offal.

Johnson’s social media posts show him lifting massive weights, pulling trucks and consuming everything from uncooked liver to testicles with his sons. He struts around shirtless and shoeless; his wife and homeschooled sons, Stryker and Rad, pad about barefooted as well. One of the boys expresses mild envy about other people’s footwear before his father makes them sprint into a field to cut open a bull, pull out its organs and gnaw on them.

“Untold” hooks into the same current of Netflix’s algorithm, buoyed in part by live wrestling and shows featuring right-wing podcasters and comics such as Andrew Schulz, Tony Hinchcliffe and Shane Gillis. Gillis will soon return in a second season of his comedy “Tires.”

But it’s also part of Netflix’s “rise and fall” true crime genre, cautioning against believing in figures like Johnson, who hooks young men by flogging a version of caveman masculinity that associates virility with dominance. Especially intriguing was Johnson’s superhuman physique, which he assured his followers was the result of a raw and primarily organ-based diet.

In 2022, a cache of leaked emails revealed that, cue the gasps and shock, an $11,000-per-month anabolic steroid habit is the secret substance pumping up his hulking frame.

The masculinity crisis seizing our land saw surprising numbers of Gen Z men break conservative to vote Trump back to office and, before that, a push for testes tanning. But it has been impacting entertainment in ways that have become less subtle in recent years, especially on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok.

Christian Nationalism’s online surge neatly dovetails with an increased demand for Christian entertainment. The most prominent example of this is the unexpected mainstream breakthrough of “Sound of Freedom” in 2023. Prime Video draws a share of that audience with “House of David,” the archetypical story of the little guy rising to defeat a giant. Season 5 of “The Chosen” is also set to debut on Prime in June. These align patriarchal themes with a return to those mythical “traditional values” from which Americans are constantly straying. 

You may remember “The Man Show,” the late ‘90s and early aughts Comedy Central frat humor slop trough that introduced wider audiences to Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla. The hosts reveled in boorish, retrograde sexism, supposedly intending to communicate that misogyny itself was an outdated joke.

Of course, in the same way chauvinists didn’t get that the 1982 book “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche: A Guidebook to All That Is Truly Masculine” is satire, many of them found the show’s humor reinforcing. Including Carolla.

Shades of “Man Show” masculinity are all around us, especially in places where we shouldn’t expect it to show up, except in this darkest, dumbest of timelines. Fox personality Jesse Watters lambasted Joe Biden for pretty much everything he did while he was president. But in 2023, he went after the guy for, of all things, using a straw. “Now, if you’ve seen me on ‘The Five’ or on primetime, you know I recommend that all men refrain from using straws,” Watters said. “It’s unbecoming . . . the way a man’s lip purses. The size of the straw is too dainty.” Sure. It’s a girth issue.

Watters has long claimed that he is not to be taken seriously. He said as much in March when he announced his “rules for men.” They include not crossing one’s legs, not eating soup in public – sorry to all those NFL spokesmen for Campbell’s Chunky, I guess – and the straw ban. “It’s very effeminate,” Watters insisted.

Cut to Thursday, May 22, when Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., proudly told a Fox reporter, “I don’t drink out of a straw, brother. That’s what the women in my house do.”

Our current masculinity obsession in popular culture dates back to Trump’s first time in the Oval Office, only back then the push was coded as catering to working-class audiences. The monstrous ratings for the 2018 revival of “Roseanne” validated that direction, and once its title character was revealed to be a Trump voter, the show was MAGA-official.  

Then, its star Roseanne Barr celebrated with a racist victory lap on social media, and the revival’s reign was over as soon as it began. But that same year brought us “Yellowstone,” Taylor Sheridan’s neo-Western about a Montana rancher who pits himself and his family against outside interests with designs on his empire and his land.

The Sheridan-verse expanded from there with spinoffs and new visions, including “Landman,” starring Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris, an oil company executive doing battle with an assortment of lawyers, mobsters, politicians, any type you could fit into the classic, “What do you call 100 [fill in the blank] at the bottom of the ocean?” joke. (Punchline: “A good start.”)

Sheridan’s dramas present patriarchal power as protective – a sea change from the Platinum Era prestige themes of power as corruptive. Real men fight for what’s theirs, including their flock.

The original “Duck Dynasty” was a family-friendly hit that stood astride the Obama administration and the age of Trump, starting in 2012 and ending in 2017. With its success, the Robertsons proved there was a marketplace for overtly Christian unscripted content. The show provided A&E with manly counterprogramming in an age dominated by the girlie “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” and Bravo’s “Housewives” empire. At the height of the show’s popularity, “Duck Dynasty” drew an season average of around nine million viewers. 

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One of the most telling stories from its heyday, however, involved a 2013 controversy resulting from elder patriarch Phil Robertson making homophobic and racist statements in a GQ profile. A&E suspended him from the show, only to bring him back in response to the audience’s outcry.

Reporting what Phil Robertson said and did in life may be viewed as speaking ill of the deceased; he died on Sunday, May 24, at the age of 79. (His family announced his Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis in 2024, although his cause of death was not revealed.)

Still, these radar blips bear consideration. Twelve years ago, if only for a moment, the network acknowledged the insensitivity of Phil Robertson’s views. One wonders whether the network would bother with such theater if a similar scenario were to occur now. Part of pop culture’s hyper-masculinity resurgence involves renormalizing epithets and abolishing considerate language. In the new age of manliness, sensitivity is feminizing.

Other signs we were headed into this rough country were apparent for some time, if we knew where to look. Culture and theology writer Paul Anleitner spells this out in an insightful X thread he posted shortly after Trump’s re-election in November, citing some obvious examples like the rise of “anti-woke” comedians, and what he calls the “Star Wars” wars, along with the resurgence of . . . Creed? Yes. He’s serious. 

Jennifer Connelly plays Penny Benjamin and Tom Cruise plays Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in “Top Gun: Maverick” (Paramount Pictures / Skydance / Jerry Bruckheimer Films)

Another blaring siren, Anleitner says, was the explosive popularity of “Top Gun: Maverick” two summers after George Floyd’s murder. He explains that Tom Cruise’s Maverick represents the “more traditional American values of meritocracy over aristocracy amid what was supposed to be a cultural revolution intended to set up a new inverted aristocracy.”

Earlier in 2022, Prime Video released the first season of “Reacher,” which became a sleeper hit. And the success of “Top Gun: Maverick” redux carved out a marker for last year’s “Road House” starring Jake Gyllenhaal and mixed martial arts champion Conor McGregor.

McGregor, by the way, has been accused of numerous physical assaults, along with facing sexual assault allegations. He also has a lovely documentary about him streaming on Netflix. In related news,  “Road House 2” is officially a go.

The state of the world is such that “Duck Dynasty” producer Rob Worsoff is pitching another reality show tentatively titled “The American” that would show immigrants competing for U.S. citizenship in a series of challenges. This is not a joke – The Hollywood Reporter received confirmation from the Department of Homeland Security that the show’s proposal was under review.

What would some of those challenges be? Worsoff envisions them engaging in “stereotypically American [read: manly] activities like collecting gold from a mine in San Francisco or assembling a Model T in Detroit,” THR reports.

Elsewhere, Roseanne Barr is pitching a sitcom about an Alabama farmer “saving the United States from drug gangs and China,” according to its description in Variety.

All this is enough to make progressives wonder if they are the surrounded and endangered species. Maybe. For now, we should also remember that our collective appetite for partisan entertainment is limited. And there are reasons to hope this fever is breaking.

Musk still holds sway as an influencer, but the larger public and MAGA were souring on him before the New York Times’ Friday report alleging that he is ingesting enough illegal substances to compromise his health and judgment.

The Liver King has nothing on Musk, but at the end of “Untold,” as he sniffs a melon, talks to strawberries and extols the virtues of pooping in his garden, it’s hard not to think that this once mighty caveman’s appeal has been diminished. It’s also difficult to tell whether his fans still buy into it.

A surer indicator is to observe what’s popular in the current marketplace. The biggest box office surprise of 2025 is the runaway success of “Sinners,” an original concept featuring a primarily Black cast that’s still generating impressive ticket sales a month and a half after its release. Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning,” meanwhile, is being outperformed by Disney’s “Lilo & Stitch.”

Allen’s show may top ABC’s sitcom lineup in the ratings, but its most-watched series, “High Potential” and “Will Trent,” play toward a female-skewing audience and attract millions more viewers in that previously cited 35-day multiplatform Nielsen assessment. At the moment, the most popular TV series on Netflix is “Sirens,” starring Julianne Moore, Meghann Fahy and Milly Alcock. 

You may also notice that “Duck Dynasty: The Revival” is less about promoting Willie Robertson than lifting his children: Sadie, who heads her own podcasting and Christian lifestyle brand, and John Luke, who’s minding his small batch coffee label.

In the revival’s premiere, neither they nor most of the next generation seem interested in the old way of promoting the Duck Commander brand. Willie, jovial as he is, may be out of step with the direction the family business is taking. That path looks decidedly female-forward and welcoming to all. Except, perhaps, the local mallards.

“Duck Dynasty: The Revival” premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday, June 1 on A&E. “The Liver King” and “Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney” are streaming on Netflix.