The New Yorker:

In the age of maga, the show’s small-town values are both a relief and slightly outdated. In the end, will we and the animated characters all live like city people?

By Rachel Monroe

I came to “King of the Hill” late, during the covid pandemic. The animated hit co-created by Mike Judge ran for thirteen seasons starting in the late nineties. I’d avoided it then, largely because Judge’s previous show, “Beavis and Butt-Head,” had left me feeling squeamish—those pervy stoner chuckles; the word “bunghole”—and also embarrassed that I couldn’t hang. Watching “King of the Hill” for the first time, I was reassured to realize that the show’s repressed central character, Hank Hill, wouldn’t have been able to abide “Beavis and Butt-Head,” either. (If someone said “bunghole” in Hank’s presence, he would no doubt make one of his signature sounds, a panicked, muffled yelp: bwah!) My friends who’d watched the show when it first aired tended to relate to Hank’s son, Bobby, the show’s lazy, husky, prepubescent weirdo. But, coming to it as an adult, I found that it was Hank—rigid, rule-bound, secretly tender—with whom I felt a kinship.

“King of the Hill” had two main advantages as a pandemic companion: it was relaxing, and there was a lot of it—more than two hundred and fifty episodes. When the show first aired, critics had called it “defiantly slow” and “utterly trivial.” Amid a global pandemic, its slice-of-life portrayal of a suburban Texas neighborhood felt nourishing, a vicarious experience of the mundane dailiness that covid had yanked away.

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