August 6, 2025 - 1:00pm
For years, an oddly persistent question floated around the internet: would Hank Hill have voted for Donald Trump?
The discourse around the politics of King of the Hill’s animated protagonist buzzed for many years after Fox cancelled the long-running animated sitcom in 2009. It grew during the heightened cultural wars of the post-Obama era, when everyone felt it was a moral imperative to render a verdict on whether every piece of pop culture ephemera — past or present — fit within a narrow partisan outlook. Was a TV show or movie good or bad, Red or Blue, problematic or based? Americans were eager to retrofit Hank as MAGA: according to a YouGov poll last year, he would be more likely to back Trump than any other fictional character except All in the Family’s Archie Bunker.
But the creators of the new 10-episode Hulu King of the Hill revival aren’t so sure. The show ducks the question without entirely avoiding it. In an early episode, Hank is confronted by Dale Gribble, his old friend group’s resident conspiracy theorist, who speculates about George W. Bush’s Deep State ties while visiting W’s presidential library. In response, Hank calmly provides a mundane fact about Bush and quips: “See, facts can be fun.” It’s a quiet moment that says more than it lets on: in 2025, Hank appears to be a rules-and-norms-loving Never Trump Republican, the kind who might read The Bulwark or retweet The Lincoln Project.
In many ways, it’s oddly comforting that King of the Hill has returned from a long hiatus. It was one of the few mainstream shows which managed to appeal to both Red and Blue America, at a time in the Nineties when people were less obsessed with that metaphor. It followed the mundane adventures of Hank, a middle-aged man with a flat top and a flat emotional register, living in the fictional town of Arlen, Texas, where political differences were handled with quiet passive aggression and cold beers.
The new season brings back many of the familiar characters — Hank, Peggy, Bobby, Dale, Boomhauer — now older, wiser, and unmistakably post-2020. The elder Hills have spent much of the last decade in Saudi Arabia of all places, where Hank worked for energy company Aramco, before returning to the Lone Star State to retire. Hank’s son Bobby is no longer an awkward preteen but a 21-year-old chef of a restaurant he describes as “a traditional Japanese barbecue with a fusion of flavours and techniques from the German traditions of the Texas Hill Country”.
It’s a set-up that allows the show to reflect on how the surrounding world has changed since we last glimpsed these characters: Covid is referenced, as are culture-war touchstones such as gender-neutral bathrooms and cancel culture. While Hank bristles at craft beer and bike lanes, he also learns about, for example, the cultural appropriation of Girl Scout cookies. The problem is that these aren’t jokes — they’re gestures. The plot lines aren’t exactly bad, but they feel too engineered to mean anything. You can see the sweat from where the show is straining to bridge America’s political divide.
In tone and content, it’s the polar opposite of the latest season of another long-running animated Nineties show, South Park, which has gone all-in on direct satire of Trumpism and contemporary politics, gleefully inflaming the divide rather than attempting to heal it. Whereas South Park sharpens its knives, King of the Hill offers an awkward group hug. This new series means well. But the harder it tries to bring us together, the less funny it becomes.
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