The Biggest Plot Holes in the ‘King of the Hill’ Revival

Despite its near-perfect critical reception, King of the Hill’s current revival season opens the door to some pretty big mysteries. Are Nancy Gribble and John Redcorn actually back together after 10 seasons, or are they just really, really flirty? Where the heck are Luanne Platter and Lucky Kleinschmidt? Is Hank Hill’s newfound appreciation of charcoal-cooked fare here to stay? 

But these questions pale in comparison to the biggest issue dogging the show’s revival: How, exactly, does the passage of time work in Arlen, Texas?

Much like The Simpsons and Bob’s Burgers, King of the Hill’s original run used a floating timeline. This allowed Hank and company to interact with modern technology and groundbreaking pop-culture events without making us witness Ladybird’s death (fly high, diva) or sending Bobby off to culinary school. Adding in a decade-long flash forward, however, has ripped some pretty big holes in Arlen’s space-time continuum.

Hank and Bill Dautrieve look roughly the same, but John Redcorn and Nancy appear as though they’ve thrown their retinol to the wind. Hank and Peggy have only been away from Arlen for roughly eight years, but are still somehow flummoxed by things like gender-neutral bathrooms and rideshare apps, both of which would have already been popular before they moved to Saudi Arabia. Most egregiously, Bobby, who was 13 during the series finale back in 2010, is now 21 and a successful chef. Meanwhile, his uncle, G.H., is a full-bown, podcast-listening teenager, a shift that should be impossible considering he was still in diapers at the end of Season 13.

Given the show’s signature realism, which King of the Hill co-creator Mike Judge recently touted while promoting the show’s revival season, fans naturally had concerns about these continuity errors, and gathered in the show’s subreddit to puzzle out some answers. 

“I thought the idea that they returned from Saudi was a pretty clever way of bringing them home to a changed world,” wrote one fan. They were “happy accepting that in-world about 8 years had passed,” but found it “very strange that Hank and Peggy are retired when they should be aged about 50.” 

They weren’t alone either. “I had these exact thoughts!” another Redditor exclaimed. “I like that they have aged up, but when Bobby said he was only 21 I went????? Don’t understand why they didn’t just make him at least 30, the appearance of everyone else would make more sense then.”

That said, a different Redditor managed to find a semi-passable explanation for this time-bending madness. “People’s ages,” they wrote, “are unmoored from the date and independent of each other.”

“Season 14 takes place in 2025, which is 8 years after 2010, which was 2-ish years after 1997,” they theorized. “G.H. has aged in near real time, Bobby has aged in in-universe time, the adults have all aged somewhere between the two. All other temporal anomalies can be reconciled under this framework,” they concluded.

Works for me. After all, as they say, time flies when you’re having fun. And the KOTH revival couldn’t be any more fun unless it traveled back in time to the show’s true halcyon days.