TV Talk: ‘King of the Hill’ revived on Hulu, funny as ever

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

The Fox animated hit “King of the Hill,” which aired 1997-2010, gets revived with all 10 episodes of its 14th season premiering Aug. 4 on Hulu.

This isn’t a reboot but a continuation. Although 15 years have passed in the real world, the new season, while set in the present, takes place around a decade after the original series ended.

Bobby Hill (voice of Pamel Adlon) is now a 21-year-old chef running his own Japanese restaurant in Dallas. His parents, perpetually frustrated Hank (Mike Judge) and excitable Peggy (Kathy Najimy), return from a long stint overseas. Hank worked for a company in Saudi Arabia as the assistant manager of Arabian Propane and Propane Accessories.

Hank and Peggy’s homecoming to Arlen, Texas, is full of mixed emotions as they discover much has changed in America while they’ve been gone, from the addition of bike lanes to all-gender bathrooms. For Hank, who eschews displays of emotion and loves order and rule-following, these are new challenges that fluster his sense of how things should be.

“King of the Hill,” created by Greg Daniels (“The Office”) and Mike Judge (“Beavis and Butt-head”), always straddled a line of mocking aspects of modernity, including some political correctness, while simultaneously embracing decency and kindness. Or as the Associated Press’ Anthony Breznican wrote in 2002, “Although the show pokes fun at Hank and Peggy’s lack of sophistication, it generally favors their orthodoxy.”

That remains true in the revival, which is funny and clever in the way the first episode’s script, by Daniels, Judge and new showrunner Saladin K. Patterson, updates viewers on the characters and what they’ve been up to.

The worldview of conspiracy theorist Dale Gribble (Toby Huss) may be (frighteningly) more relatable to some segment of American viewers than ever. For everyone else, Dale remains an entertaining nutjob, who, it turns out, was briefly Arlen’s mayor.

Dimwitted Bill (voice of Stephen Root) hasn’t fared well without Hank’s presence, becoming a housebound hermit who watches everything on Netflix.

“Did you know when you finish Netflix that you get something called ‘a welfare check?’ ” Bill says.

In addition to ever-present, unintelligible Boomhauer (Mike Judge), the men who hang out in the alley and drink beer are now joined by Brian Robertson (Keith David), who rented Hank and Peggy’s home while they were abroad.

It’s unsurprising that Hulu would want to revive “King of the Hill.” Adult animation does well on streaming and the animated format allows the characters to grow and change without live-action worries about what actors look like now, whether they’re still acting or their willingness to return (although in this case, most did).

Patterson, who previously ran ABC’s 2021-23 “Wonder Years” revival, did not work on the original iteration of “King of the Hill,” but he almost did. He turned down an offer to write for “King of the Hill” and opted for a job writing for NBC’s “Frasier” instead.

“That’s something Greg never lets me live down,” Patterson said in a Zoom interview late last month.

Daniels and Patterson became friends after that and worked together on an animated comedy, “The Cops,” about two L.A. cops that was to star Louis C.K. and Albert Brooks voicing the lead characters, but the show never made it to air after Louis C.K.’s sexual misconduct scandal.

That “Wonder Years” reboot demonstrated Patterson figured out “how to take what was a beloved property and reimagine it for both the original audience and the new audience and the challenges that come with that,” Patterson said. “It equipped me for what was still going to be a challenge coming into an existing situation like this.”

Patterson said he sought guidance from Daniels and Judge on “the rules of the universe” to keep consistency with the original series. It also helped that several behind-the-scenes personnel, including writer Norm Hiscock and supervising director Wes Archer, returned for this new iteration of the series.

Patterson said Daniels and Judge first started to think about reviving the show after a successful cast reunion and script reading at a 2017 festival.

“They were thinking about, why should we do it?” Patterson said. “Sure, the fans want to see it, but what would make it feel like there’s a reason to revisit?”

That’s when Daniels and Judge came up with the idea of Hank and Peggy returning to America from abroad.

“Greg may have known some people who had gone over and worked for Aramco and lived at the American Aramco base there in Saudi Arabia,” Patterson said. “He thought that would be an interesting place to put Hank and Peggy during this interim, not just because that Aramco base is built and designed to represent an America that actually doesn’t even exist here anymore, but it felt like something Hank would respond to. Then coming back here, where so much has changed, culturally, it felt like that’s an organic way to put a beloved character who hasn’t changed in a fish-out-of-water situation.”