Duck, Duck, Noose

My husband is in the throes of a hissy-fit.
He’s ready to string up A&E network. They refuse to rerun one particular episode of ‘Duck Dynasty’.
The one where–wait a minute.
You know about Duck Dynasty, right?

Half a year or so back I didn’t know what it was. Maybe I had seen advertisements and assumed it was another frightful reality show. The chaotic sort with a prescribed number of cuss words, bleeps, tantrums, breakdowns, fisticuffs, and flying furniture in each episode.

But my sane, moral, possibly-a-prude friend Susan told me she and her husband loved it. She challenged me to watch. (Raspberry Filling Women are not beyond wild and crazy dares.)

I watched. I loved. I dared my husband to watch. He watched. He loved.

So now we try to figure out the pandemonium that passes for program schedules on cable TV. Remember when we were young? We knew ‘The Partridge Family’ would air Friday evenings at 7.
 New episodes began in the fall.  Cable seasons, however, are determined by tipsy executives throwing darts at a calendar. Programs are shot out of a pellet gun and peppered throughout the week. Sometimes all the pellets hit one day and we could watch 24 hours of ‘Duck Dynasty’ and then spend another fortnight trying to find where the next episode landed. Woe betide the viewer without interactive TV guidance. We now keep a wary eye on A&E, afraid to blink.

One night I returned home from someplace-or-other and found a jubilant spouse. He handed me the remote (which refuses to interactivate for him) and said, “I watched the greatest episode of Duck Dynasty tonight! Show me the episodes coming up next. Maybe they will repeat it.”

That was a week ago. My poor husband, hope fading, has spent every evening we are together handing me the channel changer.
“Was it ‘Samuri Si?” I ask.
“No”  “Plan Bee?” “No” “Redneck Roadtrip? Daddy’s Got a Gun?  The Grass and the Furious?” “No, No, NO!”
He is in despair. Maybe it was too funny. Too redneck. Maybe they pulled it, and it will never see the light of day again.
I look online for previous episodes. There is only one I haven’t seen.
“Was it ‘Frog in One’, where Willie and Jase skip out of Career Day at their kids’ school to go golfing? And they find frogs on the golf course? And hunt them at night and tangle with security?”
My husband is grabbing his head, rocking back and forth and moaning.
“Stop!” he begs. “Now you know everything that is going to happen and it won’t be fun for you. But it doesn’t matter. It’s never going to air again. I just know it.”
**********
Dear Santa,
Please send my husband episode 4, Season One, of ‘Duck Dynasty’. Until you do I am a prisoner chained to a remote and a television.