Despite the strong views held by its characters and the occasional appearance from a real-life Texan politician, King of the Hill isn’t a particularly political comedy — that is, unless you’re a government spook working for Big Peanut.
In the recently released Hulu revival season, King of the Hill (sometimes awkwardly) side-steps the trap of falling into one side or another in the culture wars that have taken over comedy in 2025. While Hank Hill and the citizens of Arlen, Texas generally hold old-school Republican views on the role of government in the individual’s daily life, even in the original series, Hank was never so inflexible with his beliefs that he couldn’t occasionally agree with the other side, and the reboot has, so far, been no different. In the closing moments of the show’s tonally muddled first episode, both Hank and the writers establish that King of the Hill will never be a show centered around pronoun controversies or mask mandates, but, rather, it will continue to focus on community and family.
King of the Hill showrunner Saladin K. Patterson recently spoke to Cracked about how he and his team managed to keep the spirit of the show completely intact during a time of deep division in America, and, while King of the Hill Season 14 certainly doesn’t shy away from the social issues that are on the minds of so many Texans, the creators had some rules about how the sitcom can and cannot mine politics for punchlines. According to Patterson, Mike Judge made it clear that King of the Hill cannot and will not use political humor to attack anyone on the right or left side of the aisle.
Don’t Miss
That’s a little rich coming from the guy who once accused George W. Bush of having a limp handshake.
“Hank Hill always represented the very common-sense middle ground,” Patterson commented on Hank’s rigidly straight moral backbone. “Whether it leaned left or right, it was always the common-sense middle ground that was built on respect, listening before you speak, doing what was right and doing the thing that’s going to be the least hurtful.”
However, as Patterson pointed out, “If we brought Hank back to this current day, Hank’s middle ground isn’t the middle anymore. The extreme has moved so far that Hank’s middle ground looks like the other side to them.”
At the same time, Patterson clarified, Hank’s place on the current political spectrum was never supposed to be the focal point of the new season, just as his small-government conservative leanings in the original series were more idiosyncratic than they were preachy. “King of the Hill, historically, was never as political a show as people try to project onto it,” Patterson pointed out. “It was always more about the social commentary, and it was always more cultural because it was based on the characters and the relationships and what it’s like to raise a family or to be neighbors.”
But, given how, as many conservative politicians have noticed since Fox first canceled the sitcom, politics is downstream of culture, 2025 partisanship was bound to make an appearance in the King of the Hill revival. As such, Patterson, Judge and co-creator Greg Daniels all needed to be aligned on how they planned to place Arlen in the current political climate, which means drawing some lines.
“For Mike, that line was about not being mean — not coming across as mean to anyone on the left or the right,” Patterson explained. “For Greg, that line probably had more to do with what’s really represented in real life — if we can point to someone in real life who acts like this, then that may have validated the representation in the show.”
On the other hand, Patterson believed that even a nonpartisan series needs to be cognizant of how they contribute to national conversations. “For me, that line was, ‘What do we want to say about this? What part of the conversation do we want to be in?’” Patterson explained. “Still, the show is never going to be about whatever that thing is. The show’s always going to be about our main characters with relatable stories.”
“Regardless of what side of the aisle you fall on, you can relate to the real-life experiences that these animated characters are having,” Patterson concluded, conveniently ignoring the microbrewing community who now find themselves under attack from King of the Hill’s anti-IPA bigotry. Some people do like beers that try too hard to taste like anything besides beer, Hank.
