Reboots and revivals seem to dominate every area of entertainment nowadays and the genre of adult animation is no exception. In 2022, Beavis and Butt-Head came back with its first new episodes since 2011. In 2023, Futurama returned after a decade off the air and the cult series Clone High got a second season 20 years after its first. But last year, every one of these revivals was outshined by the most pitch-perfect reboot of the decade.
King of the Hill, which returns to Hulu on July 20, began back in 1997. The show focused on the life of Hank Hill (series co-creator Mike Judge), a proud seller of propane and propane accessories. Hank’s basic personality trait is that he’s a level-headed guy, even if he is a bit old-fashioned. As such, he constantly has to be the voice of reason for his idiot friends, his wife with often-terrible judgment, and his son who he just barely understands. In contrast to most cartoons, the hallmark of King of the Hill was how grounded its stories were and how true-to-life the characters seemed. The most lasting image from the series is Hank and his three neighbors sipping beer in front of a fence and a lot of the show was just that — four guys standing and talking about next to nothing.
The original run of King of the Hill went for 13 seasons on Fox. As opposed to a show like Clone High, which was criminally short-lived, King of the Hill ran for 259 episodes, so it hardly seemed like it needed to come back. Plus, there was the added wrinkle that King of the Hill would be returning during a much more divided time. A great deal of online discourse already existed around whether Hank Hill would have voted for Donald Trump and if his conspiracy theorist friend Dale Gribble (Johnny Hardwick/Toby Huss) would have gotten absorbed into QAnon.
If anything, it seemed King of the Hill was the worst show to reboot in 2025, as it presumably had to come down on one side or another.
But returning executive producers Judge and Greg Daniels, along with new showrunner Saladin K. Patterson, deliberately didn’t do that. The only “side” the show came down on was the side of common sense, which was once again Hank’s defining trait. In the years between the final season of the original run and the reboot, Hank had been working in Saudi Arabia, making him a bit of a fish-out-of-water when he returned to Texas. This cleverly turned Hank into a bit of a man out of time, an old-fashioned, common-sense Texan who can barely keep up with the changing world and wonders if he should.
Hank’s wife Peggy (Kathy Najimy) was also in Saudi Arabia with Hank and is similarly unchanged. Their son Bobby (Pamela Adlon), however, is now a 21-year-old restaurateur. Hank’s pals Dale, Boomhauer (Judge), and Bill (Stephen Root) are largely unchanged, though Bill did become a shut-in in Hank’s absence. The only major characters missing from the series are Peggy’s niece Luanne, whose voice was supplied by the late Brittany Murphy, as well as her husband Lucky, played by the late Tom Petty. It seems the creative team felt it was best to let these characters go, rather than recast.
The show didn’t shy away from the culture wars either. To their credit, Judge, Daniels, and Patterson took on hot-button issues like gender fluidity and cultural appropriation, but not in South Park’s aggressive “pick a side” way. Instead, King of the Hill managed to feel like it was evoking a time before politics seemed to weigh into every corner of our lives. Through the eyes of Hank, the show treated the extremes of both sides as exactly that. Both seemed equally alien and offensive to him. As a result, somehow, just like it did back in the day, the King of the Hill reboot managed to evoke praise from both sides, with each often thinking the other was the butt of the joke.
In truth, neither side was the target and King of the Hill managed to illustrate that by having Hank shake his head in confusion at just how crazy and divided everyone has become. It was a delicate balancing act that the show pulled off perfectly, which is why what once seemed to be the worst show to reboot ended up being the very best show for our divided times.
