‘King of the Hill' Review: Still a Man's World, but a Different One

New York Times

2 days ago

One attraction of animated shows is that while we get older, they stay frozen in time. On the Peanuts specials seen on Apple TV+, Charlie Brown continues to lose baseball games a quarter-century after Charles Schulz's death. There is no reason that age or mortality need intrude on the Springfield of 'The Simpsons' or the Jersey Shore of 'Bob's Burgers.'
Nor, for that matter, the Arlen, Texas, of 'King of the Hill.' Which is why — while a revival of a show that had an excellent 13-season run and a pitch-perfect ending may not have been urgent — the new season, which begins on Aug. 4 on Hulu, deserves some credit. Time did not need to pass in Arlen, but it did.
Hank Hill (Mike Judge), propane salesman and exacting home craftsman, and his wife, Peggy (Kathy Najimy), are returning home to retire after a stint in Saudi Arabia, where Hank worked for Aramco. Their son, Bobby (Pamela Adlon), once an awkward tween who developed such a love for chopped liver that he contracted gout, is now 21 and running a restaurant in Dallas that fuses Japanese food with German American Texas Hill Country flavors.
Meanwhile, curious things have happened in and around Hank's beer-drinking alley. Dale Gribble, Hank's conspiracist neighbor, served briefly as mayor during the pandemic. (Johnny Hardwick, who died in 2023, voices Dale in some episodes and is then replaced by Toby Huss.) The local sad sack Bill Dauterive (Stephen Root) has been a shut-in since Covid.
It is as if Hank represented some sort of social glue, a spirit of by-the-rulebook decency in whose absence everything went haywire. (So now you know whom to blame.) 'Hank,' Peggy asks, 'have things changed here more than we thought?'
Hank is used to being chagrined. It is his destiny, his set point. From 1997 to 2009, 'King of the Hill' was a minutely observed comedy about a traditionalist man in a changing world. What distinguished the show from similar comedies, like 'All in the Family,' is that Hank is both distressed by change and willing to grow. (In the new season, he has come to love soccer, which he once said was 'invented by European ladies to keep them busy while their husbands did the cooking.')
Hank's father, Cotton (Huss), who died late in the series's run, was a meanspirited tyrant who berated Hank well into adulthood. Hank sought to be a different kind of father, but he struggled to understand Bobby, who preferred prop comedy to football. 'King of the Hill' was a show about the crisis of masculinity, long before Joe Rogan stepped into his podcast studio.
The revival brings back the original creators, Judge and Greg Daniels, along with Saladin K. Patterson, who rebooted a sweetly rethought 'The Wonder Years' for ABC. Time hangs over the new episodes in sad real-life ways, with several cast members' — Hardwick, Jonathan Joss, Brittany Murphy, Tom Petty — having died. There are other personnel changes: The alley gang now includes a Black member, Brian Robinson (Keith David), and Ronny Chieng replaces Huss as Hank's materialistic Laotian neighbor Kahn Souphanousinphone.
Line by line, the laughs are still there, starting with the opening scene, in which Peggy over shares with the passengers of a transoceanic flight about Hank's famed narrow urethra. The show still deeply understands Hank's voice and character, particularly how retirement fits uncomfortably on a man who always defined himself by productivity. 'I didn't retire to sleep my life away like some [barest pause] nepo baby,' he tells Peggy.
The bigger change is in Bobby's story, where the revival has most thoroughly rethought itself. Having skipped college to run a restaurant that serves a lot of privileged Southern Methodist University students, he is in some ways now the true heart of the show's comic populism. He's all grown up — you may see and hear more of his romantic experiences than you are ready for — but as a result, his and his parents' stories often run in parallel, sapping the intergenerational dynamic of the original series.
Then there's how the world has changed. 'King of the Hill' was rarely explicitly political. (The conservative Hank was shocked to learn that George W. Bush had a weak handshake.) But it was deeply incisive about social politics and culture clashes, set in a Texas exurb that was old-school about its meat and football but also casually multicultural in a way most '90s sitcoms were not.
The revival has fun with Hank's horror at finding Arlen filled with poke shops and e-scooters. But the America Hank has returned to is not transformed simply because it has bike lanes. Many of its big recent changes have been changes backward; traditionalist men have become kings of the hill again. And a lot of Hank Hills have either embraced a less respectful, Cotton-esque form of politics, found themselves turning against those views, or just quietly learned to live with cognitive dissonance.
The new season wants to engage with that only so deeply. It tells us that Hank watched Fox News in Saudi Arabia (and CNN during the commercials) and that he did not vote for Barack Obama. But as for any more recent political events, the series is mum.
This is a welcome choice, to a point — straining to have a take on the current administration undermined sitcom revivals like 'Murphy Brown' and 'Roseanne.' But 'King of the Hill' has always been a show about the way we live now, and we don't live the way we did in 2009.
This is probably why Hank has been a popular subject in the parlor game of 'Who would this TV character have voted for?' At heart, this exercise is a way of engaging, secondhand, with how our own hometowns and old friends have changed. I don't blame 'King of the Hill' for wanting to avoid that. But to the extent that Arlen is an island of comity now, it feels less like Everytown, U.S.A., and more like Brigadoon.
The season takes a sidelong approach to current events in the third episode. Hank and Peggy visit the presidential library of the younger Bush, only to find that their tour companions in a White House simulation exercise are interested only in conspiracy theories. Meanwhile at his restaurant, Bobby is accused of cultural appropriation.
The clashes are right in the show's wheelhouse, and funny in execution, but they also show the limits of comic both-sidesism. On the one hand, the breakdown of social trust and of a shared sense of reality make reasoned governance impossible. On the other, someone might make you feel bad about cooking fusion cuisine. One of these is not exactly as egregious as the other.
One of the season's best new episodes combines the series's ear for the moment with its character roots. Hank finds himself briefly hosting 'Good Hank' — his teenage half brother from a later marriage of Cotton's — and ends up accompanying him to a 'boot camp' run by a manosphere personality.
If you watched Hank's attempts to introduce Bobby to his idea of manly pursuits in the original run, you can probably guess how this goes. Hank is delighted that Good Hank wants to step up and become a man, then horrified at the sleazy influencer — who runs the meeting holding a pair of golden balls called 'The 'Nads of Truth' — and the whiny attendees who blame all their problems on women.
The episode unfolds with the chaos and slapstick you would expect of a show that built a plot around Bobby's education in the self-defense tactic of kicking people in the groin. It also has the bittersweet overtones of 'King of the Hill' at its best. What Hank is really confronting here is the abusive legacy of Cotton, for whom he was never good enough, never man enough.
The 10-episode season has its moments like this — even if, as with many TV revivals, they are only moments. 'King of the Hill' could just as well have stayed in a restful retirement. But for Hank, there are still odd jobs to do, and plenty of things that need fixing.