Mike Judge Reveals What Separates ‘King of the Hill’ From ‘The Simpsons’
On the surface, King of the Hill and The Simpsons aren’t all that different. They were both staples on Fox throughout the 1990s. They both feature beer-loving, blue-collar dads doing their gottdang best to do right by their kids. And they’re both the brainchild of animation legends — Mike Judge (King of the Hill) and Matt Groening (The Simpsons).
But despite all these similarities, there’s one major factor (beyond basic competence) that separates the respective worlds of Hank Hill and Homer Simpson, according to Mike Judge. When the King of the Hill revival hit Hulu this week, co-creator Judge opened up about revisiting Arlen, Texas after 15 years, and told Deadline how the show’s signature realism not only set it apart from its long-running peer, but inspired the series’ roughly eight-year time-jump.
“Our show is less surreal than other animated shows, like say, The Simpsons,” he explained, seemingly referencing the several quirks that accompany Homer and Marge’s floating timeline. Instead of taking a page from Groening’s ever-growing book of revisionism and turning Bobby into a Fortnite-obsessed teen, Judge and his colleagues decided that moving King of the Hill forward “seemed like the right thing to do.”
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“It just seemed that even during the original run of the show, especially with Bobby, how long can we get away with keeping him (a teenager)?” Judge argued.
After “(kicking) around a lot of ideas,” Judge and company discovered the best way to manage the reboot’s time-jump was by giving Hank and Peggy Hill a reason to leave and return to their hometown. “We came upon this idea of Hank and Peggy, who were gone out of the country in Saudi Arabia, for however many years, and then they come back,” Judge explained, noting that this shift “seemed like a good way in” to these changes.
But as Judge later admitted, the time-jump wasn’t only fueled by a commitment to King of the Hill’s signature ethos. “Also, when I would look on Twitter, I would see people saying that Bobby and Connie should be adults now,” he continued. “So, it just seemed like that’s what the universe was telling us.”
Who said Twitter was useless?
