There’s maybe no project looming on the pop culture horizon at the moment that we need to be good quite like the King Of The Hill revival that’s currently in the works at Hulu. Mike Judge and Greg Daniels’ long-running, low-key examination of Texas life (and Texas life accessories) has steadily ascended to the status of “foundational text” over the years since it first aired—at least around our households, where shouts of “That’s my purse, I don’t know you!’ and “Pocket sand!” are distressingly common. We really, really would like to enjoy our return to Arlen, Texas, and the worldview of surprisingly gentle, narrow urethra’d Texas resident Hank Hill.
Now, we’ve gotten some new details about what the new series, which was greenlit in January 2023, will actually be about, courtesy of series star Pamela Adlon. Adlon, who was promoting her upcoming feature directorial debut, Babes, with Movieweb, got onto the topic of suspected Buddha Bobby Hill, who she voiced in more than 200 episodes of the original series. Adding to info that we’d already heard from star Stephen Root, Adlon confirmed that the show will take place several years after the original series ended, with Bobby now 21 years old, and working as “a chef in a fusion restaurant in Dallas.” And, god, but you can just imagine it, yeah? Mike Judge in his best Hank Hill voice, saying “a fusion chef in Dallas,” struggling audibly to figure out which precise word to put more of his good-natured contempt on.
“I think it’s been freakier for Mike and Greg to think about Bobby going from 12 to being 21 and having a relationship and being a person,” Adlon said of the revival process. “But don’t we all go through that with our kids and our friends’ kids? It is shocking when I see my friends’ kids and they’re all grown up. And I’m like, ‘Wait a second, what just happened?’ So, it’s just a little bit of a mess.”
Adlon confirmed she’d recently been working on the second season of the revival, with the first still expected to debut some time in 2025. Judge, Adlon, and Root are all reprising their roles, along with Kathy Najimi and Lauren Tom; no precise word yet on how the show will handle the characters whose actors have died since the show went off the air, including Brittany Murphy, Tom Petty, and, most recently, Johnny “Dale Gribble” Hardwick, who reportedly recorded at least a few new episodes before his death last year.