After more than 15 long years away from our television screens, the Hill family and the rest of the Arlen gang are back, baby! Creator Mike Judge's "King of the Hill" revival on Hulu has given fans a chance to see what's happened to propane salesman Hank Hill (Judge), his substitute Spanish teacher wife Peggy (Kathy Najimy), and their good-hearted son Bobby (Pamela Adlon) after the series ended with its 13th season back in 2009. In the first episode of the 14th season, now streaming on Hulu, we learn
that Hank and Peggy moved to Saudi Arabia for Hank to work in Arabian propane, and the show starts back up with them returning to Arlen. The elder Hills seem more or less the same, but there have been plenty of changes with other "King of the Hill" characters since they've been gone. All the same, Hank and Peggy are retired now and Bobby runs his own restaurant, telling some fellow young folks dining there he's 21 years old when they tease him about potentially being older. Since the series ended when Bobby was 13, that means eight years or so have passed between season 13 and 14 ... right?
There's one rather large problem: In the excellent second-to-last episode of the season, "No Hank Left Behind," Hank spends some time bonding with his younger brother Good Hank (Finn Wolfhard), who is now a teenager and was only an infant when the original series ended. That would suggest that a bit more time has passed and definitely messes with the original canon timeline. After all, if Bobby was 13 and G.H. was 2 and now they're 21 and 15, that's some seriously silly math that just doesn't add up. However, despite the fact that "King of the Hill" takes place in what is ostensibly the real world (despite Arlen being a fictional town), it honestly doesn't matter that the years don't quite add up -- because that's not what's important on "King of the Hill."
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Character Relationships Matter More Than King Of The Hill's Canonical Timeline
"King of the Hill" has always played it a tiny bit fast and loose with its own canon and isn't exactly the kind of series with regular callbacks or running gags. Sure, the characters have unique traits that are brought up with some regularity, like Hank's whole urethral deal and his neighbor Dale's ridiculous alter-ego, but there's no real reason to have a strict timeline. It's possible that Bobby was lying about his age and is a few years older (which still lines up with his old friends Connie and Chane both being in college), which would potentially make the ages make more sense, but it's also entirely possible that the show's writers just didn't think about it that hard. After all, it was much more important to tell a story where Hank tried to learn more about his younger brother and the younger generation, tackling toxic masculinity in the process, than it was to worry too much about the exact age differences between the characters.
What's important about "King of the Hill" is that it's always been a show about bettering yourself and how the people we love can help us grow. Whichever small details are revealed end up being done so in service of the characters and the story, and if they don't entirely match up with other details from other episodes, that's fine. Fans have grown deeply attached to these characters because they're written and performed so well and feel like our own neighbors, so a little bit of suspension of disbelief regarding linear time isn't going to hurt anything. As long as the good people of Arlen are learning from one another and making us laugh, "King of the Hill" is doing things just right.
The "King of the Hill" revival is now streaming on Hulu.
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Read the original article on SlashFilm.
