For 13 seasons from 1997 to 2009, Hank Hill, the hero of the classic Fox animated comedy King of the Hill, existed at a precarious middle point of American culture. In some episodes, his fixation on old-fashioned values made him come across as the most repressed, clueless old man in the world. In others, it was clear that many of the things Hank stood for — particularly the importance of hard work, and of treating other people with respect and decency — were being dismissed far too easily by a rapidly-changing culture.
This was all by design. In the Clinton and Bush years, Hank was intended to represent what veteran comedy writer Saladin K. Patterson calls “the common-sense middle.” But could the show possibly work in today’s culture, which has shifted so dramatically that today Hank would probably be dismissed in conservative circles as a RINO, and his irrational conspiracy-nut friend Dale sounds like a mainstream Republican?
That was the challenge facing Patterson as showrunner of Hulu’s King of the Hill revival, which he steered alongside with original series creators Mike Judge and Greg Daniels. Before Patterson was hired to run the new 10-episode season, Judge and Daniels decided that the show would leap forward in time, allowing the characters to age and exist in the present day. Hank’s son Bobby is no longer a husky middle-schooler, but a 21-year-old running his own Japanese-German fusion restaurant in Dallas, for instance. More importantly, Hank has spent the past decade in Saudi Arabia, where he used his expertise with propane and propane accessories to work for Aramco. While there, he and wife Peggy lived in a re-creation of an idealized American small town, blind to the rapid and often ugly changes happening back in the real America.
The season begins with them returning to Arlen, Texas, to enjoy their retirement. But Hank once again finds himself a man out of time, in a way that allows King of the Hill to join The Conners and Party Down in the small handful of comedy revivals that have successfully adjusted to a new era, and used sweeping changes in culture to justify coming back after a long time away. In both its humor and its character work, the revival often evokes the Fox seasons at their best.
Patterson — who was offered a job during the series’ original run, only to join the Frasier writing staff instead — spoke with Rolling Stone this week about how the series functions when Dale represents the conservative status quo instead of Hank, what it was like writing for adult Bobby, the deaths of longtime voice actors Johnny Hardwick (due to apparent drowning) and Jonathan Joss (who was shot to death in early June), how his work on ABC’s The Wonder Years revival informed this show, and more.
What did you think of Mike and Greg’s plan for bringing the show into the present day?
I thought it was cool that they’re aging up the characters. Animated shows don’t usually do that. It was very interesting doing Bobby at the age of 21. Greg had the idea of Bobby not going to college, and starting his own career. That’s something in the zeitgeist right now; not everyone wants to go to college. And Bobby was always a kid going down his own path. With these revivals or reboots, you’re always trying to answer the question of “Why now?” With Wonder Years, we were taking a look at that same time [the 1960s] from a different family’s perspective. With King of the Hill, the “why now” is that you take someone like Hank Hill — whether you leaned left or leaned right, Hank was about bringing people together with common sense, respect, all those values. But he’s coming back to a time when the middle when he was here is not the middle anymore, because the extreme has moved so far to the middle. It felt like a natural way to bring the character into a fish-out-of-water situation where he hasn’t changed, but the world around him has changed so much, to the point where he has to relearn and reassess what it means to be common-sense middle.
Were there things you learned from doing Wonder Years that applied here, in terms of bringing back a beloved title?
Just leaning into what the core is that the original audience is going to look for, to make sure that hasn’t changed. With King of the Hill, it’s the small, relatable family stories. Focus on Hank representing that sensible middle with cultural commentary, not political commentary. That was very important to the original run of the show.
But we live in a world in 2025 when it’s very hard to separate the cultural from the political. You have an episode here where Hank goes to a George W. Bush museum, and he talks admiringly about Ronald Reagan in another episode. What do you do when culture is now so tied to politics, and when what being a Republican was in the 2000s is not what being a Republican is now?
We tried to pick and choose. In the process, we had some takes where we realized we were getting too into the weeds politically. When we first started breaking the episodes, I leaned heavily on Mike and Greg, and said, “Help me understand the rules of the universe when you were breaking stories and character.” They said to start small, with the characters and relationship dynamics, and whatever cultural comment you want the show to make, it has to be from how these characters are reacting to things for the story that they’re telling, and not the other way around. That’s how we tried to walk that fine line. There’s never supposed to be an episode about X political philosophy or X cultural philosophy for the family. But they live in the world where those things are going to affect them, so we’re dealing with it in terms of how it affects them.
The original run would go back and forth between stories where Hank was being too stubborn about his way of doing things, and others where his position turned out to be clearly right. What balance were you aiming for with that this time?
Greg would always point out that the original was at its best when Hank stood his ground, and everyone around him realized there was still some value to what he was saying even when it was old fashioned. There was a freak dancing story, where Bobby’s going to a sleepover and the kids are playing Seven Minutes in Heaven or whatever. And Hank has them going playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey, which is the most old-fashioned, boring thing ever. But it tapped into the fact that the kids did not want to grow up as fast as society was making them grow. So Hank ended up being right, even though for most of the episode, he’s blamed for being wrong. We wanted to lean into that. The danger of this kind of continuation is that it’s just Hank railing against modern technology: “The cellphones today!” We wanted to avoid that, and in avoiding that, it had to be more leaning on what’s universal, and what are timeless values.
Dale in the new King of the Hill
Hulu
If Dale has gone from being the extreme to being the mainstream, how does that change the show?
Dale still has to be, for our core group of characters, the extreme. Which he still is. He still has the conspiracy theories. And in that Bush museum episode, Hank gets frustrated that there are so many people now willing to listen to Dale. That serves to let Hank know where the world has shifted in his absence, and it frustrates him. But for our purposes, Dale is still going to be the extreme for our group.
The central conflict of the original show was Hank’s discomfort with the kind of kid Bobby was versus the kind of kid Hank had expected to raise. Bobby’s an adult now. He lives in Dallas with Joseph. He runs a business. Hank respects his work ethic. They still disagree in some episodes, but it’s not the main thing anymore. How did you want to approach that relationship?
Everyone knows the “That boy ain’t right” quote. When we began this, we wondered if the version now is “That man ain’t right.” We decided it’s not the way it was, where Hank was questioning the kind of person Bobby’s going to be, and worried about how Bobby is going to grow up. We wanted to show that Bobby in terms of his work ethic clearly took from Hank what Hank wanted him to. It now comes to that phase of life where seeing your kid as a full whole adult is still hard when you’re a parent, because a part of you needs him to need you. We wrote a lot about how difficult it is for Hank to accept that he can’t tell Bobby what’s right or wrong. Sometimes, what’s right for Bobby isn’t what Hank thinks is right. We did an episode where we find out that Bobby uses charcoal at his restaurant instead of propane. That’s a silly kind of thing, but it represents a lot in terms of what a father has to do when he recognizes his son as his own man. That’s how we deal with them butting heads now. It’s about the fact that young adults still need and can benefit from their parents, but they learn more from their parents sharing the mistakes they’ve made than telling them what to do or what not to do.
Johnny Hardwick died after he’d recorded several episodes, and you had Toby Huss step in as Dale. But it sounds like Toby’s voice occasionally in the early episodes. Is that right?
Johnny recorded for the first five or six episodes. Unfortunately and tragically, he passed. Even though we had episodes recorded, we do pickups. Johnny wasn’t around for some pickups, so when we go back to an episode and we had Toby do those.
The season ends with a scene about John Redcorn, followed by a tribute card to Jonathan Joss. Was that always going to be the last scene?
That really shook us to our core. It just so happened, serendipity, where the last episode of the season featured him the most in any of the stories we told.
Brittany Murphy died shortly after the original run finished production. Luanne isn’t mentioned in these episodes, though she had already moved out of Hank and Peggy’s house by the end of the Fox run. Was there discussion of how to deal with that?
It’s come up. If we’re blessed to be able to do future episodes, we have one in mind that we think would honor her existence still, in the universe. But we decided that, sometimes in sports, there are players that represent so much to the organization in terms of what they accomplished, and what they did, and the best thing you can do is hang a jersey up in the rafters and retire that number. It felt like that was the best thing to do in the case of Luanne and Lucky [Luanne’s husband, voiced by Tom Petty].
Toby no longer plays Kahn, and you’ve got Ronny Chieng in that role.
Obviously, times have changed since the first run of the show, and our views on casting authenticity have changed as well. We wanted to stay in tune with that, because King of the Hill was always such a grounded show, even though it’s animated. Toby agreed he shouldn’t be the one playing that character anymore. Ronny Chieng was a good find, because he grew up watching King of the Hill in Singapore. It was one of the few animated shows that they would let them watch there. We asked if watching the show helped him learn about Texas culture or Southern culture, and his point was, they didn’t see King of the Hill as a Southern show or a Texas show, they saw it as an American show. And his take on Kahn is hilarious.
You’ve also added Keith David as Brian, who was living in the Hill house while Hank and Peggy were overseas, and who still hangs out in the alley with the guys sometimes.
When me, Greg, and Mike sat down to write the premiere, we had to cover, “Well, what happened to the house while Hank and Peggy were in Saudi Arabia? There was already some talk that they Airbnb’ed it, or maybe leased it to someone. The Brian Robinson character came from those discussions. I’ve seen online, people who saw the new opening credits wondering, “Is the new Hank Black?” But there was no strategy in making Brian Black, besides the fact that Black people exist in Arlen, and it’s a good opportunity to suggest an idea of what a real Arlen would look like. And who wouldn’t want to work with Keith David? We were grateful that he was available. But he’s so busy, that kind of limits sometimes what we can do, but we want to use him as much as possible.
There’s a callback in one episode to “Bobby Goes Nuts,” the famous episode where Bobby learns that he can win fights by kicking guys in the groin. How did you decide when you wanted to do reference the old show, and how often?
It’s a tough one, right? There are certain things that are so iconic from the original. I personally wanted to make sure that we gave the fans those Easter eggs. “That’s my purse” is so iconic. I was blessed to have [“Bobby Goes Nuts” writer] Norm Hiscock as one of my writers as well. So I wanted to give a shout-out to that. There are a lot of superfans on the writing staff who remember all the best jokes. We just had to pick and choose, and make it organic to the story we’re telling now. As you can imagine, we have a board full of them.
All 10 episodes of the new King of the Hill season begin streaming on Hulu on Aug. 4.
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