One of TV's Most Beloved Republican Characters Is Back. He's Been Sorely Missed.
It was the greatest thread in the history of forums , locked after pages upon pages of heated debate : Would Hank Hill have voted for Donald Trump???
For a time, the loaded question seemed inescapable online and among TV lovers. The Trump-era discourse around King of the Hill 's propane-loving protagonist—which flared up long after Fox prematurely canceled the popular long-running animated sitcom in the late 2000s—was indicative of how the GOP's strongman turn had forced a broader recontextualization of American culture. In this brave new world, conservatism resembles less the genteel Reagan Republicanism of the Texan appliance salesman Hank Hill (voiced by King of the Hill co-creator Mike Judge) and more the paranoiac detachment from reality that characterizes his conspiracist childhood pal Dale Gribble (the late Johnny Hardwick)—but escalated even further, to the point of a national coup attempt . So when it was made official in 2023 that King of the Hill would get a new season after more than a decade off the air, fast-forwarded to the present day and populated with the same characters who had visibly aged as if they'd experienced what we all did (the emergence of the gig economy, the COVID pandemic, the rise of the nepo baby ), the discussion over whether Hank would go MAGA in this revival naturally reemerged in force.
At least, until it was very recently quelled. Two months ago, when Hulu previewed the new season's rendition of the iconic opening-credits sequence , King of the Hill co-creator Greg Daniels informed Vulture that Hank had missed the Trump train, having conveniently moved to Saudi Arabia with his wife, Peggy (Kathy Najimy), for a yearslong stint at the Aramco oil-and-gas giant . Season 14 would greet the Hills upon their return to Texas, and eager viewers would see through their eyes how the Dallas–Fort Worth area had changed , ensuring classic hijinks as the traditionalist Hank Hill settled back into his favorite neighborhood alley and cracked open a cold one with the boys. (Notably, anticipation for the revival is so high that a Texas brewery crafted a real-life version of the show's ubiquitous Alamo Beer.)
Much like how John McCain missed the tumult of late-'60s America while detained in Vietnam, the newly risen Hank lacks any direct experience of Trump's first-term American carnage and, as it turns out, remains the awkward, handy, lovable patriarch who lodged himself into the national consciousness across 13 straight seasons. Though in some ways your typical boomer, the Hank of yore always seemed a man from another time: churchgoing but not dogmatic; traditionalist but able to engage with drag queens and Texans of varying backgrounds; tough on the surface but tender enough to enter a dance competition with his dog or join a friend in giving a dress; wedded to old-fashioned conceptions of masculinity but devoted to his wife and resistant to his veteran father's rank misogyny; Republican but petty enough to reconsider his support for George W. Bush when he finds out the man has a limp handshake; partisan but awestruck in his personal encounters with Democrats like Jimmy Carter and Ann Richards (who voiced her own appearance on the show). While not uncommon in the 2000s, this type of guy seems all but extinct two decades later, at a moment when ideological polarization has calcified. These days, such flashes of independence would relegate Hank to RINO status.
But some things have changed, as the new episodes—all streaming on Hulu as of Monday—show. Now, thanks to his Saudi bosses, this former high school quarterback and beer-swilling Tom Landry stan has developed a love for … soccer ? Yes, the very sport that he once dismissed as an emasculating psyop by the European matriarchy . In Episode 5 of King of the Hill 's newest season, Hank is uncharacteristically excited to ref the local youth soccer league—and terrified of what his friends who define football by its American etymology will make of that. Rightly, as it turns out: Dale, who gets hip to Hank's new hobby when he sees Peggy coaching him (the irony!), kidnaps Hank and deems him a Manchurian candidate for “the Saudis' globalist agenda.”
It's setups like this soccer scenario, along with name-drops of figures like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, that make Season 14 so clever. Let's just get this out of the way: There is no mention of Trump throughout the 10 episodes. But the revival isn't exactly apolitical—if anything, these little touches, sprinkled throughout, allow the show to sidestep the distracting Trump shadow and appropriately transport Hank and friends to the modern era.
We learn, for example, in an Episode 3 trip to the George W. Bush Presidential Library, that Hank overcame his antipathy toward Dubya's weak grip and now idolizes the Texan ex-president, fawning over an exhibit of his 2008 order asking Congress to legalize offshore drilling. While there, however, Dale energizes the bored attendees with his trademark conspiracy theories (eg, the United Nations has fixed every presidential election and Miss Universe contest since 1979), then asks them to subscribe to his Substack ( naturally ) after he finds out his fellow travelers watch Newsmax. This spurs Hank to fruitlessly counter the crowd's nonsense with facts, including the point that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. (“That's reason enough not to vote for him without makin' stuff up.”) It's a logical stance for Hank, who vocally admits to keeping up on Fox News: in unabashed thrall to a truly heinous display of history but grounded enough to avoid the deep end. He steadies that balance throughout the rest of the season. In Episode 9, Hank takes his now-teenage half brother GH (“Good Hank”) to a two-day boot camp advertised to the impressionable young person via the internet: “Man Made,” hosted by a bald, bearded, muscular influencer named Eli who's just a tad reminiscent of Andrew Tate . Hank is initially swayed by Eli's professed fealty to “the four f-bombs” (family, faith, finances, and fitness), before realizing that Man Made is basically an indoctrination camp for insecure, budding misogynists, with Eli personally guiding everyone expected toward a hatred of the women in their lives. Hank, who begins to see echoes of their sexist father in GH, intervenes before the kid falls even further down the rabbit hole. A bit of a pat resolution to the alarming influence of the manosphere , but a sensitive outlook on how Hank would interact with it .
The new King of the Hill ’s most pointed political commentary, however, hardly involves Hank at all. In Episode 7, Peggy establishes a book nook outside her house to bring the neighborhood together and get her friends off their screens. It works quite well—but the books, which Peggy picked up from a dirty garage, are infested with bedbugs, and the amply bitten readers come together to eradicate them by burning the books. The episode ends by zooming out to reveal that the fire is being livestreamed on social media, under the title “TEXAN MORONS HAVE BOOK BURNING PARTY.” A string of outraged comments pops up on the side, as viewers eagerly mock these “hillbillies” who “can't even read” and advocate to “STERILIZE THEM!!” (Hank's plot in that same episode, meanwhile, sees him finally warm up to Bobby's vegan girlfriend when he finds out she's really good at football.)
It's that barbed book-burning moment, surely aimed at the kinds of liberal viewers who uphold Judge's Idiocracy as an oracle of the Trump age , that most clarifies why playing into the eternal Hank-and-Trump debate is unnecessary. What makes King of the Hill such a standout within the annals of animated sitcoms is its gentle approach, the generosity and empathy it extends toward all its characters—no matter how noxious—from the fictional middle-class Texas exurb of Arlen, a stand-in for the small towns that surround the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. In King of the Hill , Arlen is a sort of Everytown, USA, untainted by coastal influences or elite-college educations. It's not the type of setting you see so much in TV and movies these days, not least since there are now fewer working-class pathways to cultural prominence . The King of the Hill revival doesn't just invite us back to Arlen; it invites us back to a world many of its viewers lost touch with ever since it went off the air almost 16 years ago. This was always a smart and thoughtful show written by smart and thoughtful people, those who know that Texans are not merely reducible to their unaccountable and extreme local government , or to their voting records. Including, especially, Hank Hill.
