The deformations that take place in “Lipstick,” though, are nothing compared with the ones in “Wing Nut,” a splendidly appalling Season 3 episode that involved crossbreeding a chicken with Early’s DNA to produce a fowl with 50 wings. The local sheriff, enjoying some of the resulting product at a barbecue joint, says, “I feel like I didn’t have this many tumors when I came in here.”

Yes, “Squidbillies,” from Dave Willis and Jim Fortier (who went to high school together in Georgia), is one dark show. It makes for an interesting contrast with “Duck Dynasty,” which was subversive in its own way when it first appeared in 2012 but took its conceit in the opposite direction.

That show, of course, involves a real family, the Robertsons, who live in Louisiana. Most of the men are heavily bearded and enjoy hunting and blowing things up, and they often describe their behavior as redneck, but they aren’t rednecks at all. They’re media-savvy manipulators who, in the early years, kept viewers of all demographics guessing as to whether the antics were real or staged. The effect was to use the backwoods stereotype to draw a vast audience into their family-friendly, Christian-based world, and for a time it made “Duck Dynasty” one of the most watched shows on all of television.

That juggernaut lost most of its steam in late 2013, when the patriarch, Phil Robertson, made some incendiary remarks about gay people, and since then, the show’s viewership — almost 12 million before the debacle — has fallen precipitously. Wednesday’s two-episode season premiere drew only about 1.3 million, according to TV by the Numbers, not that far ahead of a “Squidbillies” rerun.

Don’t blame all of that on Phil Robertson. Overexposure has also helped take the air out of “Duck Dynasty.” Robertsons join politicians for photo ops, turn up at events like the White House Correspondents Dinner and, in general, are marketing machines individually and collectively. And their show is omnipresent. Like “Squidbillies,” “Duck Dynasty” is beginning Season 10. How, if the show has been around only since 2012? Easy, if you stack your seasons only a few months apart.

And the Robertsons have decidedly lost their subversive edge. In Wednesday’s premiere, the central couple, Willie and Korie, were being given a 25th-anniversary party, though they realized midway through the episode that — surprise! — it was really only their 24th. In the show’s early years, the family members might have sold the supposed misapprehension as genuine; at this point, though, no one is even trying to appear spontaneous, and the whole enterprise looks scripted.

“Squidbillies,” in contrast, is still as caustic as ever. As the season premiere ends, Early has been transferred to the stem cell lab. Have you ever imagined a squid with human ears — lots and lots of ears?