In the New Season of King of the Hill, A Good Show Struggles to Be Great

The first (and most important) thing that should be noted about the revitalized North Texas cultural artifact that is King of the Hill, which debuted a new season on Monday, is that it does feel linear to the show's original run.

When watching the new 10-episode season, it becomes obvious quite quickly that new showrunner Saladin K. Patterson did his research before working on the highly-anticipated 14th season. The cadence and style of jokes are a 1:1 match to the beloved cartoon's previous seasons. From the first episode of the new season, Hank is still ostensibly old-school, bitching about bike lanes and failing to understand how a hybrid car operates.

The jokes are nothing we haven't seen before — an old guy complaining about wokeness, or liberal ideas and the like has been cannon fodder in the sitcom world for years now, as evidenced by whatever show Tim Allen is working on at the moment.

But KOTH was never about a conservative complaining about the libs. Hank Hill was, and is in the new season, a common-sense guy. The show frequently made fun of both conservative and liberal extremes, with Hank playing the straight-shooting voice of reason as the characters escalated through whatever they were dealing with that week.

Hank was a stodgy, traditional type set in his ways, and the various predicaments he encountered existed to challenge his views. Sometimes he learned something through his love and growing acceptance of Bobby. Other times his role as a middle-aged white man thrust into situations he would otherwise be ill-equipped to handle forced him to adapt to the chaotic life in Arlen. Either way, Hank perseveres, usually to the audience’s amusement. In the new season, that formula remains mostly the same. As Hank himself would likely advise, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

In a lot of comedies and sitcoms, as time goes on, characters start to become more extreme parodies of themselves. The first season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, when contrasted with the latest seasons, prove the gang has become endlessly more unhinged as the limits of their characters pushed further out. Even KOTH managed to do it by the end of the original run, with Luanne going from Hank’s handy redneck niece to a baby-voiced smooth brain.

To our delight, it seems they managed to avoid this trap in the new season.

This second run also excels at showing a natural progression of the characters' lives in the time since it went off the air in 2010. In that span, Hank and Peggy spent time in Saudi Arabia (pronounced Sod-Eye Arabia by Peggy, whom none of the characters ever correct). Dale, just as deranged and conspiratorial as ever, is a perfect reflection of where things have moved culturally as his wild theories make even less sense than they did before. Bill became an obese shut-in during the pandemic (that plotline is quickly dropped by the second episode when he returns to original form) and Boomhauer takes care of his girlfriend’s kid.

All this to say, the new season is not without its problems.

One of the most entertaining elements of the original run was the massive world Mike Judge managed to create, and in the new season, Arlen seems so much smaller. This seems at odds with the understanding that North Texas (which Arlen is famously based on) has become one of the fastest-growing regions in the country since we last saw the Hill Family and friends. So many side characters added to the color of Arlen, and it seems there would only be even more to build on now.

Of course it's intriguing to see how the main characters progressed, but we need to see how the world they exist in progressed, more so than low-hanging fruit like bike lanes and gender-neutral bathrooms. Even with new characters, and new locations like Bobby’s restaurant, Robata Chane in Dallas, the world they navigate somehow feels kind of unfamiliar.

Which brings up the issue of continuity, which by the later seasons of the original run was pretty much just episode to episode. A quick browse through Reddit in just hours after the new season premiered makes clear that many shared questions were looking to be answered, and so many weren’t. We still don’t know if Boomhauer was really a Texas Ranger. We've lost the voice actors of Brittany Murphy and Tom Petty, who played Luanne and Lucky, respectively, since the show ended, but to not even pay quick lip service about such adored characters with even a throwaway line seems like a misstep.

All 10 episodes are easily bingeable and worth the watch. But we're hoping that in the 15th season, we get a truly iconic episode in the ilk that this show became known for — something was missing this season. It’s been over a decade since we heard Bobby yell “that’s my purse, I don’t know you,” so forgive us for craving a new, meme-able moment in an otherwise very good show.

All episodes of King of the Hill are available now on Hulu.