How does the King of the Hill reboot fit into a very different America?

The Guardian

3 days ago

The Fox Network's rotating lineup of animated sitcoms increasingly dominate the list of the longest-running scripted prime time shows ever made. Whether they're the actual record-holder (The Simpsons), a once-canceled cult show turned institution (Family Guy, or the cable-channel-hopping Futurama), or a 'newer' show that's actually entering its 16th season (Bob's Burgers), these shows leverage their age-defying format to serve as both a constant in their viewers' lives and a living document of contemporary American life over their many years on the air. So it's not unusual that King of the Hill, a Fox cartoon that aired in the late 90s and throughout the 2000s, would rejoin its corporate cousins for a 14th season on Hulu. But just as during the show's original run, it's an odd fit with those other, brasher animated sitcoms – sometimes blessedly so.
It would be easy enough to characterize King of the Hill as a red-state Simpsons. Instead of bumbling everyman/id Homer Simpson, created by anti-establishment cartoonist Matt Groening, it focuses on the genially repressed Hank Hill (Mike Judge), created by satirical cartoonist Mike Judge. Hank is a buttoned-up propane salesman who values courtesy, patriotism, tradition and decency; in a switch-up from typical sitcom dynamics of its era, the show portrays Hank's wife Peggy (Kathy Najimy) as the more hubris-prone buffoon of the two (especially as the seasons progress). Throughout the series, Hank struggles to connect with his preteen son Bobby, who doesn't share his predisposition toward stoicism. And as with the Springfield of The Simpsons, the rest of the show is populated by residents of Arlen, Texas, a fictional but realistically rendered suburb of Dallas.
Judge has always made it clear that he doesn't consider King of the Hill principally political. Hank's obvious conservatism has as much to do with his manner as his beliefs, which the show takes care to not root in bigotry or ideological stubbornness. Hank pre-visions sitcom characters like Ron Swanson, the anti-government government worker who became a favorite on Parks and Recreation. Unlike Ron, who was genuinely more effective with a touch of cartoonishness in earlier seasons before the show's writers became addicted to portraying him as a genuinely great guy, Hank is always presented as even-keeled and sensible, with the show's humor often coming from his squareness. The writers also do an admirable job of keeping its politics local, exploring how social changes (like 'going green' in a later-period episode) affect Arlen in particular. The words 'common sense' get thrown around a lot, in discussing the show and within the show itself. The sense of cartoon mischief that informs its other contemporaries (including Judge's more satirical Beavis and Butt-Head) is minimal.
For example, when The Simpsons did an episode about the Bush family, it playfully (if somewhat good-naturedly) caricatured ex-president George HW Bush as a Mr Wilson figure to Bart's Dennis the Menace, a clever riff given that Bush had earlier targeted The Simpsons in a speech as less aspirational than family shows of yore. (Later presidential jabs were not so obtuse.) Beavis and Butt-Head once met Bill Clinton, and the show characterized him as having a little more in common with the boys than some would expect. Meanwhile, in the fifth-season premiere of King of the Hill set around the 2000 presidential election, George W Bush appears at a rally attended by an enthusiastic Hank, who loses faith in his preferred candidate when he gets a sample of a surprisingly limp handshake. Mostly, though, the episode is about taking pride in voting, no matter what compromises or surprises await in that process. The show didn't change drastically, if at all, with W actually in office – or, for that matter, with the rise of Obama, though the show's final episodes, aired during Obama's first term, were likely produced before he was sworn in.
That's also an area where the show's animated approach came in handy: It was able to run for well over a decade and only nebulously age its characters a few years. The approach was more akin to a newspaper comic strip than a weekly TV series, even a Simpsons-style cartoon (where the characters' age stasis becomes part of its self-referential lore). Yes, the Hills could encounter George W Bush during the 2000 election, but a decade later, Bobby Hill could remain on the verge of adolescence, the show's pace intentionally slowed; real-world details were introduced or elided at the show's convenience. The lead characters' consistency could remain a beacon of small-c conservatism, in the way that sitcoms can be inherently conservative with their episode-ending resets.
The new season makes a major, bold move in that respect: It actually jumps forward in time. Bobby is now college-aged, though he's running a restaurant in Dallas rather than matriculating anywhere in particular. Hank and Peggy have just returned from a multi-year stint living abroad in Saudia Arabia for Hank's propane work, from which he has now retired back to Arlen. The viewers' time away from the characters is at least in part granted to the characters themselves, something that The Simpsons has consigned to the realm of what-if episodes about the future (or episodes about an ever-revised, time-shifted past).
It's a poignant touch that, strictly speaking, may not have been necessary – at least not if the idea is for Hank to react to various modern-day devices, figurative and literal, with a little extra culture shock. Hank doesn't actually need to dip out from the country to break out his trademark quiet consternation; he was plenty flummoxed by the natural course of history in the show's original run. Though the time jump does generate fresh material for Bobby, and for Hank and Peggy's newfound idle retirement, sometimes it also feels like a workaround for the topic of Trump and the degree to which conservatism has lost that small 'c' as it shifts further and further to the right.
Yet despite that avoidance, the newest season also feels like a specific product of the Biden era, which of course would have been when it was largely developed and written. Without mentioning any elections directly, the characters seem like they're shaking off the worst cultural clashes of the first Trump term and the pandemic that capped it off. To that end, the gags that have to do with Hank and Peggy's gap years from Arlen – like the ongoing retrospective saga of paranoiac Dale's unlikely winning of Arlen's Covid-era mayoral election, or their friend Bill becoming a shut-in – are lightly cathartic and very funny. When the first episode ends with Hank and Peggy comforted and heartened by the friendliness they receive from a diverse Arlen population, it's appropriately heartwarming. It's also sweetly funny to see Hank repulsed by the antics of a men's-rights group that blames all their problems on 'females'. On the whole, the new season is as solid as ever.
Yet there's something slightly off about the show treating this stuff as just another assortment of generational foibles. It's an understandable instinct. King of the Hill sure isn't trying to be a firebrand bellwether of good liberal outrage. It's trying (usually quite successfully) to be funny, and the Trump joke sure isn't funny anymore, if it ever was. Bringing Arlen into the Trump era without Trump is a way of modernizing the characters without turning their world into the kind of political lightning rod that would make Hank recoil. But it also seems designed to burnish Hank's image; his particular conservatism can still look sensible if it doesn't have to be associated with any unseemly actual conservatives. (The men's rights guys, for example, are presented as misguided dopes misled by a bad apple.) The thing is, Hank doesn't need the coddling. Plenty of good King of the Hill episodes do revel in his discomfort, even as they sympathize with him. The new season, good as it is, aims to give Hank a new dose of those temporary feelings in a relatively safe space. It's not really the show's fault, but there's an increasingly blurry line between gently understanding humanism and letting everyone off the hook.