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I first discovered King of the Hill during the COVID pandemic. The animated masterpiece, a collaboration with Mike Judge, ran for 13 seasons beginning in the late ’90s. I’d previously avoided it, largely because Judge’s predecessor, Beavis and Butt-Head, disgusted me — the twisted junkie giggles, the word “hole” — and made me feel ashamed that I couldn’t watch it. When I first watched King of the Hill, I was relieved to realize that the show’s reserved protagonist, Hank Hill, wouldn’t have been able to stand Beavis and Butt-Head, either. (If someone said the word “hole” in front of Hank, he would certainly let out one of his signature sounds: a panicked, muffled “Bwah!”) My friends who watched the show on its original airwaves mostly identified with Hank’s son, Bobby, the show’s lazy, raspy, immature weirdo. But as I got older, I realized that it was Hank—strict, demanding, but secretly kind—with whom I felt a greater kinship.
King of the Hill had two main advantages as a pandemic companion: it was relaxing, and there was a lot of it — more than 250 episodes. When it first aired, critics called it “obnoxiously slow” and “utterly trivial.” In the midst of a global pandemic, its down-to-earth depiction of suburban Texas felt nourishing, providing a window into the foreignness of everyday life that COVID-19 had robbed people of.
The show's protagonist is Hank Hill, and his kingdom is nothing special: a ranch in the fictional town of Arlen, Texas. He works as a propane salesman and meets with his neighborhood friends in the alley to drink cans of Alamo beer. Hank is a do-gooder with simple interests. He loves his lawn mower, America, Troy Aikman, and Ronald Reagan. He is often perplexed by his son Bobby, a fan of slapstick comedy and pop culture who is as expressive as Hank is reserved, and overwhelmed by his wife, Peggy, a substitute teacher and former Boggle champion with high self-esteem.
I appreciated the show for its ability to evoke a pre-Greek time, when problems were small and solvable and the ugliness of the world remained under control. (It seems fitting that, though Bobby aged a few years over the course of the show, it ended before he fully hit puberty.) In the early seasons, the characters were hand-painted against watercolor backdrops that gave off a subtle glow. (The show switched to digital animation in season eight.) During transitional moments, a few shots lingered on the sky above Arlen, the gradient of color suggesting a long summer evening as the humidity begins to give way to night. On Reddit, I came across threads devoted to the feeling of King of the Hill’s skies: “so 90s/early 00s cozy, it’s impossible to describe”; “is it possible to feel nostalgia for a place you’ve never been?”; “end of summer, start of school, dinner at a steakhouse, with that smell in the air…”
King of the Hill was canceled in 2010. This week, it returns to Hulu with a 10-episode revival set in the present day. One of the strange conspiracies that has emerged from the absurd, irritating years is the insistence by some that, due to dark forces controlling the weather, the sky has changed for the worse. “Who remembers when the sun was gold instead of silver, the sky was bright blue instead of pale milky blue, and there were gorgeous cirrus clouds everywhere, sharply outlined against the sky; when the sky wasn’t streaked with strange bands that expanded with terrifying inevitability, blocking out the sun, creating bizarre sundogs, and then settling into a gray-clad, motionless curtain of cloud with a drizzle the next day?” author Naomi Wolf wrote on X last year. Given the world we live in now, I was both anxious and excited for the show's return. How do we reconcile its easygoing charm with our current stressful reality?
“King of the Hill” debuted on Fox in 1997, when animation was defined by its adventurous energy and cynicism about the American nuclear family. “The Simpsons” had been on the air for nearly a decade; “South Park” launched later in 1997, and “Family Guy” two years later. But “King of the Hill” was trying something different. The pilot opens with Hank and his three friends standing next to a car with the hood open, staring in fascination at the engine. For over a minute, no one says anything except “Uh-huh.” It was an announcement of the show’s laid-back Texas rhythm, and also
Sourse: newyorker.com
