First Official Look at the ‘King of the Hill’ Reboot Is Bittersweet

King of the Hill’s legacy should be right up there with The Simpsons. The show took animation and used it to tell character-driven stories with real stakes and consequences. Like their yellow neighbors, King of the Hill would reach a point where the episodes got more episodic and began to lose their emotional heft, but those first five or six seasons are unimpeachable. It’s stellar, hilarious television, and even though it wasn’t at its peak when it was cancelled, the end still felt too soon.

Had it held out for a few more years, perhaps it could have moved to another network or been saved by the streaming boom. Instead, the show ended, with some of its final episodes being run in syndication. Shortly after the final episode properly aired, one of the series’ stars, Brittany Murphy, tragically passed away. Murphy was an indelible part of the show as Luanne Platter. Perhaps it was her passing that kept the show from being revived. It certainly seemed that way in my mind.

There have been rumblings about the show’s possible revival for years, but it seemed like everyone had moved on. Mike Judge created Silicon Valley and even had a successful reboot of Beavis & Butthead. Pamela Adlon created and starred in Better Things. Stephen Root kept appearing in… everything. Sadly, Tom Petty, who became a regular voice on the show as Luanne’s husband, Lucky, passed away in 2017.

Despite everything that has happened since 2009, King of the Hill is coming back.

A reboot/revival of the show was announced in January 2022. It felt too good to be true at the time, but it has since been picked up by Hulu. More details have emerged since, like the fact that the show will feature a time jump, bringing them into the modern times and aging up Bobby Hill to be a 21-year-old who works in a fusion restaurant in Dallas. It’s all very exciting, but was once again marred by tragedy a year after it was announced with the passing of Johnny Hardwick.

Hardwick voiced Dale Gribble, one of the funniest characters on the show. The conspiracy theorist and chainsmoker (Gribble, not Hardwick) was a strange beating heart for the grounded comedy. While he recorded all episodes of the reboot before his passing, it casts a pall over the new iteration of the show, no matter how exciting the prospect of new episodes is. Hulu released a poster showing Hank Hill and his friends (Dale, Bill Dauterive, and Boomhauer) with modern comforts, wrinkles, and a bit more paunch. I gasped when I saw it. Still, I know things won’t be the same, even with the same creative team behind it. I’m happy King of the Hill is back, but pieces are missing, and that is bittersweet.