In ‘King of the Hill,’ Mike Judge Finds Hope for America

When President Donald Trump decided to celebrate his 80th birthday, and 250 years of American democracy, with a UFC cage match on the White House lawn, Mike Judge was surprised he didn’t get an invite.

After all, the event, “UFC Freedom 250” felt like an outtake from Idiocracy (2006), Judge’s painfully prescient satire of the dumbing-down of U.S. politics and culture.

“Someone on X posted the motorcycle jump [on the White House lawn] and it was like the movie, when we had President Camacho (Terry Crews) on a motorcycle, a big chopper, with all his secret service on motorcycles too,” says Judge. “I don’t what to say. There was a lot of stuff I missed in Idiocracy, but quite a few things I seem to have gotten pretty close to.”

Idiocracy topped a recent New York Times readers’ poll of the films that best capture the American experience. The Hollywood Reporter ranked it third in its list of The 25 Movies That Explain the American Soul.

But the same could be said about King of the Hill.

The animated series, created by Judge and former Simpsons writer Greg Daniels, follows the lives of propane salesman Hank Hill, his wife Peggy, son Bobby and their friends in the suburban town of Arlen, Texas.

If Idiocracy shows America at its imbecilic worst, King of the Hill is kinder: a portrait of decent, if flawed, Americans trying to do their best. Idiocracy is deeply political. King of the Hill is overtly non-partisan, but in a way that feels less a cop-out than a corrective.

“For me [the idea for the show came] after George W. Bush took office, after 9/11 when the war started,” says Judge. “I was living in Texas and a British guy, a journalist, asked: ‘What’s it like, living in Texas now?’ I thought: ‘What are you talking about? It’s just day-to-day life. Everyone isn’t sitting around obsessed with politics and world events.’”

For its 13-season, Emmy-winning run on Fox, from 1997-2009, King of the Hill managed to portray an America not irrevocably divided along lines of red and blue, progressive and reactionary. The show didn’t, like South Park, dive into the trenches of America’s culture wars. It suggested instead that there was a world outside them. And that’s where most Americans live.

The astounding thing: King of the Hill is still showing us that America. Last year Judge and Daniels, along with showrunner Saladin K. Patterson (Frasier, The Bernie Mac Show), rebooted King of the Hill for Hulu and Disney+. Season 15 dropped on Monday.

Much has changed in the lives of the Hill family. Hank and Penny are now retired, returned from years overseas, working in Saudi Arabia to build their retirement savings. Bobby, now in his early 20s, works as a chef in a sushi restaurant and is in a slow-burning relationship with Connie, his childhood sweetheart.

“Bobby is the kid who didn’t go to college and now is hard working, trying to get ahead,” says Daniels, “who finds he’s now in the second stanza of a country song — he’s turning into his dad.”

Episode plotlines in season 15 include stories of Peggy going through menopause, Hank reluctantly attending a comic convention with Bobby, and Hank and Peggy falling victim to an AI cyber scam. As always in King of the Hill, the politics take a back-seat to the day-to-day.

“It would be hard to outdo, to out-extreme, to out-satirize political life these days,” says Patterson. “So instead we start with what our characters are experiencing in their world. It’s more social commentary than political.”

“It’s like when they say, if you’ve been online too long, you have to go outside and touch grass,” adds Daniels. “The spirit of the show is that real life is a lot more in the middle between the extremes the algorithms are pulling everybody towards.”

In today’s increasingly divided America, that makes King of the Hill feel quietly radical. As does the show’s tone pitched, Judge says, at a register to appeal to “my former neighbors in Texas” as much as coastal audiences.

“When I did Silicon Valley, we wanted it to feel right, legitimate, for the people actually there living through that stuff,” he says. “It’s the same here. If you can get the nuance, the specifics, of this world right for the people that live there, it’s going to be relatable for everyone.”

It appears to be working. Hulu has renewed King of the Hill for at least two more seasons. There’s talk of a movie spin off.

Judge isn’t ruling anything out. But for the moment, he’s just happy to be back in Arlen.