Hank Hill forever

[Editor’s note: Interviews for this piece were conducted before the writers’ and actors’ strikes.]

When King Of The Hill debuted on Fox in 1997, I was more likely to change the channel than I was to stick around. Something about it seemed, well, a little boring. It was so defiantly suburban. My thinking was, why even make an animated series if you’re not going to take advantage of the genre’s built-in excuse to break the rules of physics, employ exaggerated physical comedy and gross-out humor, or cut away to nonsensical gags? I gave it two seasons, tops.

But several things happened after season one. Protagonist/patriarch Hank Hill became less of a cruel dick, receiving an earlier version of the Michael Scott character-likability surgery The Office would undergo years later. And more importantly, I also began adapting to the quieter nature and slower pace of the comedy. What I thought would be a flash-in-the-pan footnote in TV comedy turned into (at one point) the second longest-running animated series on television. The sheer depth of its character development set it apart, and it eventually made its way into my personal cartoon pantheon. Which is why I’m so excited to see what Hank and his crew will be up to in Hulu’s upcoming revival series, which brings back creators Mike Judge and Greg Daniels and the bulk of the cast.

While there are great one-liners and laugh-out-loud moments, much of the show’s comedy is slow-burn, with a vibe that’s slyer and quieter than The Simpsons or Family Guy. But something the show had in common with its predecessor, particularly the earlier seasons, was the wholesomeness at its core. This family loved each other, they loved their neighbors (even Dale), and when push came to shove, they showed up for each other.

Like me, Emily Marsh was also a bit slow to embrace KOTH. “There were a couple times [early on] I remember thinking, ‘Well, I could change the channel,’” says Marsh. But upon rewatching some episodes more recently, she was reminded of “how much heart the show had.”

And like most early fans, Marsh first got into the show by virtue of it coming on right after The Simpsons. An actor who fell in love with puppetry while working as a cast member on the Broadway hit Avenue Q, Marsh has also had roles on Doom Patrol and Moon And Me. She currently co-stars in the latest iteration of the legendary genre-defying (and puppet-driven) cult comedy, Mystery Science Theater 3000 as Emily Connor, where she shares hosting duties with Jonah Ray.

“It started the idea of animation being grounded”

“As a Simpsons fan, there are so many lovable characters, and it’s such a smartly written show. Then you hear about King Of The Hill, and it’s also about a family in the suburbs, but it’s set in Texas, while Springfield’s location is so up in the air… I think its legacy is it kind of started the idea of animation being grounded,” says Marsh. “King Of The Hill ended up being this TV show where, yes, it was animated, but everything they did with it you could have done as a live-action show.”

As a veteran puppeteer, Marsh has something in common with the late Brittany Murphy’s character, Luanne Platter. Luanne’s “Manger Babies” puppets often feature among the episodes she likes to cue up for a rewatch. “I kind of punished myself by watching the puppet episodes of TV shows to be like, ‘This is how the world sees you! Always remember!’” Marsh recalls.

Luanne’s evangelical animal puppets are clearly inspired by the surprisingly deep genre of televised Christian puppetry. “You could go down a black hole with [researching] those shows and it is very interesting … and I love [Manger Babies’] conceit. It’s just such a thin premise. They got frozen in ice, and now they’ve come back to life, and they’re waiting for Jesus. It’s like so many shows in that Christian-media sector,” says Marsh.

One place where she sees KOTH’s grounding influence is Netflix’s BoJack Horseman, where of course there are anthropomorphic animals, but storylines are firmly rooted in reality and tackle addiction, mental health, and the perils of TV stardom. (Perhaps not coincidentally, KOTH alum Wyatt Cenac plays recurring character Wayne on BoJack).

Marsh also credits KOTH for kicking off “the trend that an animation doesn’t have to be big and bold, or unable to be done by real people.” In regard to the show’s perspective, Marsh goes back to the First Family of Animation. “I hate to keep going back to the same comparison, but I think of an East Coast sensibility as [driving] The Simpsons. Which makes sense because when you look at the writers’ rooms, a lot of those people came from Ivy League schools and were joking about these bigger topics.” In contrast, King Of The Hill was taking “a more Republican, middle-of-the-country, rural/suburban view.”

And the differences don’t stop there. As someone who watches a lot of reruns, when I’m watching modern animated shows I’m still struck by the pacing of jokes. I vividly recall being blown away at the pure speed of the banter the first time I saw Archer. And today, when I take in Rick And Morty, it seems even faster; there’s a gag every three seconds. Laugh too long or too loudly, and you’ll miss six jokes.

KOTH often prefers to take its time, meandering its way through the plot and the punchline like a gently buzzed Texan who’s crushed a couple cans of Alamo Beer and isn’t in any particular hurry to get anywhere (unlike those damn New Yorkers, amirite?). One of the show’s best running gags is the secret of uber-Texan Hank’s birth, a source of never-ending ridicule and shame for him: the women’s room of Yankee Stadium in—ominous beat—New York City, revealed in the season five classic, “Yankee Hankee.”

Keeping that leisurely pace in in mind, Marsh wonders, “With the revival, kind of my first question is: Are they going to try and keep the pace the same? Are they going to try and modernize it a little bit? I don’t know which way I’m gonna fall on that. I guess as an old fan, you’re like, ‘Let’s keep it the same!’ But maybe that makes it harder to access.”

“They paint Texans in a pretty accurate light”

Speaking of accessibility, the cultural specificity and quirks of its localization are baked into the show’s setting of Arlen, lending it a patina of reality Springfield is unable to offer. And for Thai Nguyen, who grew up in Texas watching King Of The Hill, the broad strokes of its characters and depiction of life in the Lone Star state ring true.

“They paint Texans in a pretty accurate light,” says Nguyen, who lives near Houston these days. “We do love barbecue, eating hamburgers, football, and baseball. So it nails the stereotypes, but doesn’t paint us in a negative light.” Nguyen and his siblings got hooked when they came home and watched it after school. He was around 10 years old when he started tuning in, and a couple of years ago he began rewatching the series.

A son of Vietnamese immigrants, Nguyen feels like KOTH got a lot right in “its depiction of many Asian immigrants.” He explains: “Fortunately, my parents weren’t really like that, but I’ve had uncles and neighbors like that. They can be very hard on their children. They want them to go to the right school, have a better life, and do whatever it takes to succeed. And when they fail? Oh, it’s the end of the world. Like when Khan lost his job because of Hank. He couldn’t handle it and went off the deep end,” says Nguyen, referencing the episode “De-Kahnstructing Henry” from season three.

In Nguyen’s view, it’s Khan’s constant social-climbing aspirations that hit home the most, especially in regards to keeping up with the Wassanasongs. “That aspect of the Asian community, about getting into the right golf club or country club? That’s very true,” Nguyen concurs, recalling Arlen’s coveted Nine Rivers Country Club (a possible nod to the exclusive Nine Bridges Golf Course on South Korea’s Jeju Island).

But for Nguyen, the most relatable character was the King himself. “My favorite character is Hank Hill, which I’m sure everyone says. He’s relatable to me, because he’s a blue-collar man, he takes his job overly seriously, he’s very loyal to an employer that could care less about him … he’s so awkward with his wife about love, he has a son who he doesn’t know how to talk to or handle, because he’s so different.”

While Nguyen doesn’t have kids, he does have nieces and nephews, and often feels like Hank around them. “What is going on, why are ya’ll doing this? We never did this back in my day–that kind of thing,” Nguyen says with a laugh.

One of Nguyen’s favorite episodes is another season six entry, “Soldier Of Misfortune,” in which the paramilitary/conspiracy-minded Dale Gribble (voiced by Johnny Hardwick, who passed earlier this year) attempts to become a mercenary, but then has an accidental discharge at the local gun range.

“They all kind of clowned on him,” recalls Nguyen. “So Hank, Bill, and Boomhauer decide to cheer him up by [anonymously] answering his magazine ad for his services as a mercenary. He goes through all these hoops only to fail, but at the last moment comes in clutch and saves them from their demise.”

Gribble is a character that feels prescient upon rewatching. He was QAnon before it existed, although in a fairly “bipartisan” way (in the sense that he distrusted both parties as well as the federal government apparatus), latching onto even the most ridiculous conspiracy theory as gospel, living in fear of black helicopters and an often undefinable “they.” In his dark aviator sunglasses, it’s not a leap to envision him recording shrieking videos of himself in his Dodge Caravan “Bugabago.”

Maybe not surprisingly for a show The Atlantic once dubbed “the last bipartisan TV comedy,” Nguyen doesn’t see the show as being explicitly political. “It doesn’t touch too much on politics. I see it as a lighthearted show, but I think Hank is more middle-ground. He likes things on both sides. He likes what he likes.” Nguyen specifically references “The Father, The Son, And J.C.,” from season six, a classic involving President Jimmy Carter brokering peace between Hank and his father, Cotton. Sure, later he and his father bond over mocking Carter’s policies, but upon meeting the Democrat and former President, the deeply conservative Hill is awestruck. “You ran our country … America,” he says, clearly moved and filled with respect for the office.

But not every former president gets a pass. In one memorably hilarious dig, Hank drives to Little Rock, passing a “Birthplace of President Bill Clinton” sign. His eyes narrow, and he locks his car doors, in a gag reminiscent of the opening minutes of Office Space. “I don’t think they necessarily pick on any one thing too much. One [episode] will make fun of liberals; another will make fun of conservatives. A lot of people can enjoy it. It’s a good mix. It’s very fair,” says Nguyen.

“The show was ALWAYS woke”

Mirroring the many threads and conversations among the show’s fans, Marsh views it a little differently, framing it as both political and bipartisan. “[King Of The Hill] was very explicitly political, which I thought was cool … now Bob’s Burgers, I think, is explicitly trying to not be political,” says Marsh. She compares KOTH’s evenhanded approach more to South Park in that regard, “because they’re a chaos muppet of a show, and you don’t know where they are going to fall on any issue, or who they’re going to come for next.”

When the news about the KOTH revival initially broke earlier this year, I was immediately curious how the dedicated fan community would react. One of the first reactions/exchanges I saw in a Facebook fan group went something like:

Fan 1: “Wow this is great news! But I hope they don’t ruin the show and make it woke.”
Fan 2: “What the fuck are you talking about? The show was ALWAYS woke.”

And admittedly, KOTH’s stance can be difficult to pin down. In the pilot episode, after Bobby takes a softball to the eye, a social worker from Child Protective Services mistakenly believes Hank is abusing him, and dismisses the town of Arlen as just some dumb hicks. It’s a classic case of big-government overreach, and the CPS worker serves as a caricature of an effete big-city liberal, stumbling about in a conservative small-town culture he both misunderstands and is biased against.

Later on in the first season, in “Hilloween,” Christian fundamentalist Junie Harper manages to “cancel” Halloween in Arlen, convincing Luanne that it’s a holiday for Satanists. Hank pulls no punches with her, either, rallying the town to disobey the City Council’s wishes and put feet in the streets for a trick-or-treat protest in defiance of the far-right religious aims of Harper. The episode raises questions about the separation of church and state, and establishes that KOTH would go after overreach on the right and left.

So, like in many instances, it depends on what you mean when you say it’s “political,” and how you choose to define “woke,” which, while initially having a fairly narrow definition (Webster’s defines it as being “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice”), has become a kitchen-sink term in my home state of Florida for “new ideas I don’t like.”

It’s unclear whether Hank’s Laotian neighbor/frenemy Kahn Souphanousinphone will be appearing in the revival, which isn’t surprising in light of the sea change in animation’s voice acting sector. Post Hari Kondabolu’s The Problem With Apu, most animated shows have made a concerted effort to replace white actors voicing characters of color with actors who better reflect them. And while one of the fun things about an animated show is that anybody could conceivably voice anyone (or anything), in practice, what historically happened was that white actors usually voiced everyone and everything.

While Khan’s wife and daughter, Minh and Connie, are voiced by Lauren Tom, a Chinese-American actor, Kahn himself is voiced by Toby Huss, a white actor who also voices Cotton Hill, Joe Jack, and a few other characters. But in retrospect, the show’s treatment of minority characters has aged a lot better than that of The Simpsons. Yes, it’s still a show largely about a white nuclear family’s dynamics and their mostly white and conservative neighbors. But Danny Trejo voiced Enrique, future Daily Show correspondent Wyatt Cenac was a writer on the show for four years, Chris Rock and Phil LaMarr voiced recurring character Roger “Booda” Sack, and Kahn eventually became almost as much of a core character as the show’s main quartet of alley drinkers.

And whereas Apu often serves merely as an easy punchline, Kahn doesn’t take shit from anyone (well, except for Ted Wassanasong). As Guy Aoki, the president of MANAA (Media Action Network for Asian-Americans) told The Outline: “He was a character that was confident … it wasn’t what a lot of Asian-Americans fear, which is the wimpy Asian guy who gets taken advantage of. This guy was totally in control.” In season nine, the show actually won a MANAA award for promoting positive Asian representations in American culture.

“King Of The Hill brought people together”

KOTH also featured Jonathan Joss (and originally/briefly Victor Aaron, before his tragic death) as the voice of John Redcorn, a Native American (specifically Puebloan) neighbor. Joss is of both Comanche and Apache descent while Aaron was of Yaqui ancestry (a tribe indigenous to Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora). “First native voice in a cartoon on primetime television,” Joss claims with pride. Joss also has his own opinions on why the show resonated with so many for so long, and why it’s now earned a revival. “The Simpsons talked a lot about the future … I want something that talks about ‘the now.’ I think that’s more what King Of The Hill does. It allows us to talk about what’s going on right now.”

He continues: “A lot of cartoons deal in fantasy, or things outside the norm, or [outside of] our shared humanity. King Of The Hill brought people together, brought families together, to discuss what was going on [in the present]. John Trudell [a prominent Native author/political activist] said, ‘We are all human in a world that’s forgotten what being human is all about.’ King Of The Hill reminds us that we’re human,” says Joss.

While he can’t say much about the revival’s direction, Joss reveals that he sat down for the first table reads and drops a hint that they will be tackling some recent political hot-button issues, where the question will often be: “What would Hank do? If Hank, say, was approached with mask mandates,” he explains, “wearing a mask—what would he do? I think the revival approaches Hank in a way that he will be more himself than ever before.”

That could potentially sound exciting or disappointing depending on one’s expectations, but Joss has no doubts the revival will bring the laughs. “From a personal viewpoint, I’m very happy with it. I think it’s very funny. The team has come out with … not a vintage vehicle, but a brand-new vehicle with a V8 engine, man. It’s hitting on all eight cylinders. Although I’m not sure they make many eight-cylinder engines anymore, and if Hank Hill knew that he wouldn’t be happy,” says Joss, laughing.

“We Americans need to examine our choices and ask ourselves if we’re making the right choice not just for us but for our neighbor,” he adds. “Sometimes our personal choice involves other people … King Of The Hill is back, and it may make you question yourself.”

A veteran actor with roles in Parks And Recreation and Antoine Fuqua’s remake of the Kurosawa masterpiece The Magnificent Seven, Joss downplays his role on KOTH. “I’m not a regular, I’m just one of the bananas on the tree. I want to thank Greg Daniels and Mike Judge. And I want to thank my fans. That’s why I’m back, man.”

The revival is projected to arrive sometime in 2024, and meanwhile, those fans will continue to debate the wisdom of reviving a show that had a fairly well-received ending. Plus, there’s that decision to age the characters up roughly 15 years. Is there even an appetite to see a grown-up Bobby Hill?

For me the answer is an easy yes. I won’t be the only one waiting to see what Bobby has done with his life, if Hank and Bobby have grown closer, if John Redcorn was able to move past his midlife crisis, if Peggy is still insufferable, and whether Buck Strickland is somehow still alive. (There isn’t much hope for Ladybird).

And Joss is as excited as anyone to see how things have played out. “It’s time to crack a beer, kick back, and take a look at ourselves.” His voice then changes to a pretty good approximation of the Hill family patriarch: “Hank Hill is America, I tell you what.”