The Season Premiere of ‘King of the Hill’ Revival Will Disappoint. But the Rest of the Season Certainly Won’t

Unlike Full House (three dads) or Perfect Strangers (wacky foreigner) or Dinosaurs (dinosaurs), King of the Hill has a simple premise — maybe the simplest comedy premise of the past several decades. Hank (voice of series co-creator Mike Judge) and Peggy (Kathy Najimy) raise their son Bobby (Pamela Adlon); Hank’s main social life consists of standing in the alley behind his house drinking beer with his neighbors. 

But anyone who knows the show at all knows I left out extremely salient details. Hank clashes with Bobby because Hank is a determinedly “normal” man, and Bobby’s artistic pursuits — comedy, cooking — confuses and alarms his father, eliciting Hank’s refrain, “That boy ain’t right.” Hank’s neighbors include one paranoid conspiracy theorist, and one man whose lazily enunciated accent makes him nearly incomprehensible. Hank doesn’t just drink beer, he drinks Alamo. King of the Hill isn’t just a family sitcom, it’s a Texas family sitcom. And as it returns for its 14th season, its specificity is still its greatest strength.

King of the Hill’s first 13 seasons ran on Fox from 1997 through 2009. In the manner of many if not most animated sitcoms, those episodes took place in a kind of eternal present: Characters could be born, marry, divorce or die, but kids didn’t really age. Season 14, however, changes things up. Six years before the events of the season, Hank took a job in the propane field in Saudi Arabia, to save up for his and Peggy’s retirement, so the season premiere (all 10 of the season’s episodes drop on Hulu August 4th) finds them returning to Arlen in our present day after Hank’s posting. 

An early poster for the season may have alarmed fans of the show from its initial run: a box of Alamo beer is arriving by drone; neighbor Bill (Stephen Root) is receiving a food delivery from a Mega Lo Eats robot; Dale (the late Johnny Hardwick for the first several episodes, after which Toby Huss takes over the role) is using a VR headset and vaping; and Boomhauer (Judge) is looking at a tablet with an e-scooter behind him. 

Would King of the Hill still be a grounded family sitcom, or would its homey charms be crowded out by tiresome commentary on contemporary life? The answer turns out to be “The second thing, but just for the first episode.” Apparently it’s illegal to revive an old sitcom without making sure the audience knows how their favorite old characters feel about today’s technology and social practices, and King of the Hill is no exception — though at least the time the Hills spent away explains why they’re so baffled by tipping on a rideshare app, all-gender bathrooms and new traffic patterns in the neighborhood. (See also: the original clones of Clone High having to get up to speed on social mores after being cryogenically frozen for decades.) I personally didn’t need to hear Hank Hill worrying about being “canceled,” but evidently someone thought it was important.

Peggy and Hank’s years in Saudi Arabia were also pampered. A flashback to Hank and Peggy returning home from a shopping trip on the Aramco compound shows them being greeted by uniformed house employees. Everything is so different in Arlen — a restaurant that serves Oklahoma-style barbecue??? — that the couple even decide to take a huge new contract Hank is offered. Then they pull in at Mega Lo Mart, where they’re stopped by a pair of Girl Scouts selling cookies outside the store. The Hills are snarky about how expensive the cookies probably are now, not to mention gluten-free, but find out they’re still affordable and made from the recipes Hank and Peggy know — the organization has just changed the name of Hank’s favorites, Samoas, to be more respectful to people from Samoa. Hank calls that a good change, and one of the Scouts agrees that it’s nice to be nice. Watching this episode the same week Eddington came out made this tiny moment of mutual acceptance in a red-state location feel almost revolutionary.

Among the past few years’ many comedy reboots and revivals, King of the Hill is, for me, second only to 2023’s third season of Party Down in terms of how carefully it’s thought through how its characters have changed, or not, and what they’re doing now. For example, Boomhauer has signed on as a handyman on the Taskrabbit-esque app Chorechimp. Hank, anxious to fill his days in retirement, volunteers to come with Boomhauer on his jobs, which is when he sees that Boomhauer doesn’t take the chores as seriously as he does chatting with his clients, some of whom he may be scouting as future girlfriends. A twist of the plot leads Hank to volunteer to cover some of Boomhauer’s gigs, when he learns how important the emotional labor component is to a five-star rating on the app. 

These are both recognizably the same characters we got to know in the ‘90s and ‘00s — Boomhauer the not exactly smooth-talking ladies’ man; conscientious Hank, certain of the right way to do any task he takes on — but Hank, at least, figures out that the social economy requires him to do a little more conversational hustling than he might prefer. Hank’s horizons have broadened in other ways, too, as we see when he gets drafted into refereeing youth soccer: Yes, he knows the rules, because yes, he got enraptured with the sport when he was living overseas. Hank’s grown.

Bobby’s also grown. He’s gone into business with former rival Chane Wassanasong on Robata Chane, a restaurant in Dallas where Chef Bobby weds the German flavors of his Hill Country upbringing with traditional Japanese grilling techniques (including — gasp — charcoal). We’re given to understand that he’s lost touch with Connie (Lauren Tom), his old friend and sometime girlfriend, but running into her again in the premiere rekindles his crush. Bobby is still the same sweetheart he’s always been, which is why it can be hard to watch Chane (new addition Ki Hong Lee) and his father Ted (Kenneth Choi, another new cast member) exploiting Bobby’s labor and passion. But however much Hank might have opined that Bobby “ain’t right,” he’s unmistakably Hank’s son, mostly uncomplaining about the hard work he was raised to do. Fans, however, might complain that other than one epic pencil fight with Peggy and his roommate Joseph (Tai Leclaire, replacing Breckin Meyer), Bobby’s heavy workload is keeping him from Bobby-ish hobbies; it does seem as though seeds are being planted for a Bobby burnout episode in a 15th season I have to think is imminent. 

One character who is basically the same as ever — for which we can be grateful — is Peggy. Still one of TV’s most self-confident characters, Peggy has returned from the Middle East convinced she can get by in all that region’s major languages and that she is a master of haggling. She takes pilates, seemingly just so that she can correct her instructor. After Hank only rates their rideshare driver a four to give him something to strive for and tells Peggy he thinks fives should be rare in this world, Peggy purrs, “We are. I don’t want to be conceited, but I have been told my whole life I’m a five.” Earning a dividend from their investments lets Peggy back a new business venture from Boomhauer and Dale: a company farmers can hire to trap feral pigs. Almost nothing could be more Texan than that — until the business takes off and her partner, Hank’s former boss Buck Strickland (Root), buys all the founding investors gigantic new trucks.

Dale, whose conspiratorial beliefs played a lot differently in the pre-QAnon era, was the character I was most concerned about returning. We knew from the new opening credits that Dale ran for mayor of Arlen while the Hills were gone, and in the season premiere we find out how that campaign went: Naturally, mask mandates and the notion of an “election denier denier” are evoked. In the third episode, the Hills and the Gribbles — Dale and his wife Nancy (Ashley Gardner) — visit the George W. Bush Library in Dallas; Dale commandeers the tour and spouts spurious claims about the government, to uproarious acclaim from fellow visitors. When Hank apologizes to the tour guide (Jack McBrayer), the guide wearily replies that he gets a guest like Dale once a day. And soon enough Dale is getting back to activities less freighted with political ramifications — (mostly) benign surveillance of his neighbors, complete obliviousness about Nancy’s close friendship with John Redcorn (the late Jonathan Joss) and developing baroque solutions to the rat problem at Bobby’s restaurant.

King of the Hill wouldn’t be the show we know if Dale wasn’t promulgating conspiracies and making strangers uncomfortable at least some of the time. It also wouldn’t be the show we know if “the times we live in” had curdled all the characters into red-state stereotypes. I could have done without being reminded of birtherism in the Bush Library episode, but Hank’s median-dad rejoinder to a visitor’s reference to “Obama’s Kenyan handler” makes it worth the reference: “Obama was born in Hawaii. That’s reason enough not to vote for him without making stuff up.” 

King of the Hill is still made by people who know that most Texans are good-hearted. And if that’s not enough to win you over: yes, there’s a Joe Rogan type late in the season; yes, he seems to skip leg day; and yes, you’ll be satisfied by how he ends up.