In an age when politics overpowers all aspects of life, it isn’t surprising adult cartoons regularly embrace it for fodder.
South Park’s new season drew White House acrimony after depicting Donald Trump as an egomaniacal devil-worshipping tyrant. And this was after years of leaning nominally rightward by lambasting “wokeness” and “political correctness.”
Topicality is an all-too-tempting target for hack writers, particularly when it’s easy to do it poorly. One only needs to watch the Futurama revival’s recent forays into commentary on Bitcoin and cancel culture to know how tedious social commentary can be.
This is partially why Hulu’s revival of King of the Hill has been surrounded by trepidation. After a 16-year break, the popular Fox Network animated sitcom was set to return, offering viewers the hook of aged-up characters set against the challenges of the modern world.
King of the Hill always maintained its cult-hit status by being one of the most grounded and nuanced depictions of modern life among popular animated shows. Despite being set in Texas and following conservative characters, Mike Judge’s brilliant writing captured the wholeness of life in late ’90s suburbia.
The heart of these characters — although often depicted as ignorant, narrow or deeply repressed — captured the ironies of loving Smalltown Americans who mean well but sincerely struggle with adapting to a changing modern world. They’re normal, opinionated folks, and they’re always painfully human and well-rounded. Their foibles are tangled to their humanity. Even the worst characters often are funny and pitiful.
The possibility of sticking these characters in modern situations stinks of a cheap way to drag the subtext into the text. And the trailers seemed to suggest the producers were just going to superficially cram the square peg of drones and cancel culture commentary into a round whole.
Thankfully, the newly released season has avoided most of these pitfalls to capture a fresh look at the way the world around us changes and doesn’t change.
Canonically, the show picks up nearly a decade after the series finale. Hank and Peggy Hill have finished out their careers living in a propane company town in Saudi Arabia, insulated from the modern world.
Returning to modern-day Arlen, Texas, they find the world has superficially changed. Their town is filled with Boba and Poke restaurants. Their home’s tenant is trying to convince them to install solar panels. Their friends are older and more conspiratorial. And phone apps are making people more transactional and less trusting.
The 10-episode new season covers a great deal of story territory, from Bobby Hill’s successful venture as a Dallas small restaurant owner, to the conspiracist Dale briefly becoming Arlen’s mayor, to Hank struggling to find meaning in retirement. While some of the returning side characters feel a bit cheapened, the core characters receive an authentic continuation of their older selves.
In one of the most interesting moments in the first episode, a befuddled Hank finds himself close to freaking out when he learns the Girl Scouts have renamed Samoa cookies to avoid being offensive to Samoan peoples. But faced with sincerity — they’re still the same cookies being sold for the same reasons by innocent kids — Hank reluctantly admits it’s a “good change.”
This scene captures the heart of the show’s commentary on modern life and the political changes of the last decade. Despite how much has changed, much of the world is still the same. Much of the world is just new names for older phenomena. However, our reactions to the stress of change still are real and meaningful.
In one of the most intriguing episodes, Hank and his teenage half-brother Good Hank get sucked into a men’s retreat hosted by an Andrew Tate analogue. Hank initially is impressed by the man’s purported desire to teach young men to embrace faith, family and fitness. But he quickly realizes the only solutions the man offers are teaching vulnerable men to blame their fixable character faults on women. Hank subsequently realizes the man’s abusive language is the same as his abusive father’s sexist language and struggles to convince Good Hank to walk away.
“Sometimes, the people trying to turn the clock back are festering our deepest wounds and anxieties.”
The show’s commentary isn’t narrowly focused on criticizing conservatives or liberals so much as it is interested in trying to interrogate what change means in the modern context. Conservatives and liberals are changing, but it isn’t always good or bad.
Sometimes, the people trying to turn the clock back are festering our deepest wounds and anxieties. Sometimes, change is just as simple as changing a label to be less offensive. But change also can be hollow, silly and impulsive.
This foundation allows the show to engage with a nuance that most politically topical shows often lack. By giving Hank a core foundation and strong values, the show becomes truly nonpartisan in a way that’s actually meaningful. It’s able to criticize Dale’s unhinged conspiracies in the same breath it hacks away at the logic of modern dating’s tendencies toward nonmonogamy and hookup culture.
At the end of the day, truth and authenticity are the bars the show measures against us. Hank Hill is still the man he always was, and his fresh reactions to modern life make sense. Arlen might change a little bit with time, but the goodness of people doesn’t change.
Thankfully, this message is kept alive by a show that always has been one of the best messengers about the nature of change, and it continues to be.
It’s not loyal to anybody but its own integrity.
Tyler Hummel
Tyler Hummel is a Wisconsin-based freelance critic and journalist, a member of the Music City Film Critics Association, a regular film and literature contributor at Geeks Under Grace, and was the 2021 College Fix Fellow at Main Street Nashville.
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