Sophia Michaels
Mike Judge and Greg Daniels’ classic animated sitcom King of the Hill is set to return with new episodes airing on Hulu.
A premiere date for the reboot hasn’t been announced, but the show did receive a straight-to-series order. Judge and Daniels will oversee the show as executive producers, while Saladin Patterson (who created the recent Wonder Years reboot) will join the team as showrunner.
Much of the core King of the Hill voice cast will return as well, including Judge, Kathy Najimy, Pamela Adlon, Stephen Root, Johnny Hardwick, Lauren Tom, and Ashley Gardner. The big question hanging over the reboot, however, will be how it deals with Brittany Murphy’s character Luanne, the Hill family’s 19-year-old niece. Murphy died in 2009, four months before the final episode of King of the Hill aired.
King of the Hill premiered in January 1997 and enjoyed a successful 13-season run. Set in the fictional town of Arlen, Texas, the show centered around propane salesman Hank Hill, his family, friends, and neighbors. The series earned two Emmy awards over the course of its run, including Outstanding Animated Program in 1999 and Outstanding Voice-Over Performance for Adlon in 2002.
Though it’s been off the air for a decade, King of the Hill has enjoyed continued success and relevance online. (Over the past couple of years, for instance, an artist going by “Hank Trill” has racked up millions of streams on Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok with King of the Hill-inspired raps performed in a Hank Hill parody voice.) A revival had been in the works for several years as well, spurred by a reunion at the 2017 San Francisco Sketchiest, where Judge and Daniels reconnected with the cast to celebrate King of the Hill’s 20th anniversary.
Judge also teased the possibility of a King of the Hill reboot in an interview with Rolling Stonelast year (which was mostly about a reboot of his other classic animated show, Beavis and Butt-Head). At the time, Judge said of the revival, “It’s not happening yet, but it could. It’s amazing how long these things take to get going sometimes. It was almost gonna go a few years back and then stopped. There’s a lot of lot of factors. Beavis and Butt-Head is a little easier to get going because it’s just kind of me.”
