King of the Hill is an American animated sitcom created by Mike Judge and Greg Daniels that initially aired on Fox from January 12, 1997, to September 13, 2009, with four more episodes airing in syndication from May 3–6, 2010. The show was later revived on Hulu and Disney+ on August 4, 2025.
The series follows the Hills, an American family who live in the fictional city of Arlen, Texas, as well as their neighbors, co-workers, relatives, classmates, friends, and acquaintances. The show's realistic approach seeks humor in the conventional and mundane aspects of everyday life, blue-collar workers, family conflicts, and the trials of puberty.
Judge began creating King of the Hill during his time making the MTV series Beavis and Butt-Head, which he also created and voiced. After pitching the pilot to Fox, Judge was paired with Greg Daniels, an experienced writer who previously worked on The Simpsons. The series debuted on the Fox network as a midseason replacement in 1997, before episodes of The Simpsons and The X-Files, quickly becoming a success. The show became one of Fox's longest-running series, with a total of 259 episodes over the course of its 13 seasons. Four episodes from the final season were planned to air on Fox, but later premiered in nightly syndication in May 2010. The show would later be revived in August 2025 with 10 extra episodes, with the current total of 279 episodes.
King of the Hill was met with widespread acclaim and is widely regarded as one of the greatest animated shows of all time. The series has won two Emmy Awards and has been nominated for seven. Its celebrity guest stars include Chuck Mangione, Tom Petty, Texas Governor Ann Richards, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Alan Rickman, Lucy Liu, Ben Stiller, Big Boi, Kathleen Turner, Meryl Streep, Matthew McConaughey, Sydney Pollack, Michael Keaton, Paul Butcher, Johnny Depp, Milla Jovovich, Brendan Fraser, Dax Shepard, Justin Long, Paul F. Tompkins, and numerous country music artists―including Randy Travis. The series' popularity led to worldwide syndication, and cable reruns currently air on FXX, having aired on Adult Swim, FX and Comedy Central still to this day.
On January 18, 2022, Judge and Daniels announced the formation of a new company called Bandera Entertainment, with a revival of King of the Hill being one of several series in development. On January 31, 2023, Hulu announced it had picked up the revival for two seasons. The revival premiered on August 4, 2025, with the new season airing on Hulu and Disney+ with Hulu. On October 30, 2025, Hulu renewed the series for two more seasons. The 15th season premiered on July 20, 2026.
Premise and characters Premise
King of the Hill depicts an "average" family and their lives in a typical American town. It documents the Hills' day-to-day-lives in the small Texas town of Arlen, exploring themes such as parent–child relationships, friendship, loyalty, and justice.
Unlike many adult animated sitcoms, e.g. Family Guy, the show uses a simple slice-of-life format and humorously mundane content. Critics have praised King of the Hill for its sense of humanity shown throughout the show.
Characters
+Cast members
King of the Hill is set in the fictional small town of Arlen, Texas. The show centers on the Hill family, headed by the ever-responsible, hard-working, honest, but emotionally stunted propane salesman Hank Hill (Mike Judge). The punning title refers to Hank as the head of the family, as well as metaphorically to the children's game king of the hill. He often finds his traditional conservative values challenged by the changing world around him, though his common decency usually sees him through. Hank typically serves as the de facto leader for his friends and family.
His wife Peggy Hill, née Platter (Kathy Najimy), a native of Montana, begins the series as a substitute Spanish teacher, though she has a poor grasp of the language. She pursues numerous other careers throughout the show's run. She is confident, frequently to the point of lacking self-awareness.
Hank and Peggy's only child is twelve year old Bobby Hill (Pamela Adlon), a student at Tom Landry Middle School. Much to the chagrin of his football-loving father, Bobby has little interest in athletics and instead aspires to become a "prop comic".
Throughout a good share of the series, Peggy's naïve and emotional niece Luanne Platter (Brittany Murphy), lives with the Hill family while her mother is in jail. Luanne attends beauty school and hosts a Christian-themed puppet show for a local cable-access TV station. She eventually finds employment and moves into a house on the same street as the Hill family, remaining very close to them. She engages in a relationship with and marries Elroy "Lucky" Kleinschmidt (Tom Petty), a snaggle-toothed lay about, who lives on the settlement he has earned from a frivolous lawsuit.
Hank has a healthy relationship with his mother, Tilly (Tammy Wynette, later Beth Grant and K Callan), a kind woman who moved to Arizona after divorcing Hank's father Cotton Hill (Toby Huss). In contrast, Hank has a strained relationship with his father, a cantankerous World War II veteran who lost his shins to Japanese machine gun fire and verbally abused Tilly during their marriage. Cotton later marries Didi (Ashley Gardner), a young candy striper, and they have a son, "G.H." ("Good Hank"), who bears a striking resemblance to Bobby.
Dale Gribble (Johnny Hardwick; later Huss) is the Hills' chain-smoking, balding, conspiracy-theorist, next-door neighbor. He is married to Nancy Hicks-Gribble (Gardner), a weather reporter known for her good looks and charm. Dale is unaware that their only child, Joseph (Murphy, later Breckin Meyer, and later Tai Leclaire), is not his biological son, and is instead the result of Nancy's 14-year-long affair with John Redcorn (Victor Aaron; later Jonathan Joss), a Native American healer who has given her therapeutic massages for her "headaches" for years. Despite his inclination for conspiracy theories, Dale seems to be the only one in town unaware of the affair. His neighbors decide to keep Nancy's secret to preserve Dale and Joseph's loving relationship.
Bill Dauterive (Stephen Root) lives across from the Hills. Known as the "Billdozer" in his high-school football glory days, Bill is now overweight, bald, and clinically depressed, still struggling to get over his divorce from his ex-wife Lenore. He is a sergeant and barber in the Army. He idolizes Hank and pines for Peggy, often trying to insert himself in the family. His intense loneliness makes him gullible and desperate for attention.
Jeff Boomhauer (Judge) is an easy-going philanderer most notable for his unique speech pattern. Most of Boomhauer's lines are long-winded and meandering, delivered very quickly through a mumble and a very thick Texan accent. While the characters understand him just fine, the audience isn't necessarily meant to. His given name and occupation are not revealed until the end of the 13th season.
In the series' first season, the Souphanousinphones, a Laotian-American family, move in next door to the Hills. The family consists of the materialistic Kahn (Huss; later Ronny Chieng), his class-conscious ex-wife Minh (Lauren Tom), and their tween daughter, Kahn "Connie" Jr. (Tom).
Kahn – who has a lucrative office job – is often at odds with his neighbors, believing them to be "hillbillies" and "rednecks" due to their lower socioeconomic status. Minh befriends Peggy and Nancy, though she still sees herself as superior to them. Connie has been pushed by her father to become a child prodigy and excels at a variety of things from academics to music, though she still finds plenty of time to be a kid despite the stress. She forms a close relationship with Bobby Hill, frequently hanging out with him and Joseph Gribble.
Other minor characters include Buck Strickland (Root), Hank's licentious boss at Strickland Propane; Joe Jack (Huss) and Enrique (Danny Trejo), Hank's co-workers at Strickland; Carl Moss (Dennis Burkley; later Root), Bobby's principal at Tom Landry Middle School; and Reverend Karen Stroup (Mary Tyler Moore in her debut appearance, and then Ashley Gardner in regular appearances), the female minister of Arlen First Methodist.
Canadian Broadcast
King of the Hill's original run (1997–2009) aired nationally across Canada on the Global Television Network, which simulcasted Fox’s Sunday night lineup in Canada
Episodes
Production
Conception
In early 1995, during the successful first run of Beavis and Butt-Head on MTV, its creator Mike Judge decided to create another animated series, this one set in a small Texas town based on an amalgamation of Dallas suburbs, including Garland, where he had lived, and Richardson. Judge conceived the idea for the show, drew the main characters, and wrote a pilot script.
The Fox Broadcasting Company was uncertain of the viability of Judge's concept for an animated comedy based in reality and set in the American South, so the network teamed the animator with Greg Daniels, an experienced primetime TV writer who had previously worked on The Simpsons. Daniels rewrote the pilot script and created important characters who did not appear in Judge's first draft, including Luanne and Cotton. Daniels also reworked some of the supporting characters (whom the pair characterized as originally having been generic, "snaggle-toothed hillbillies"), such as making Dale Gribble a conspiracy theorist. While Judge's writing tended to emphasize political humor, specifically the clash of Hank Hill's social conservatism and interlopers' liberalism, Daniels focused on character development to provide an emotional context for the series' numerous cultural conflicts. Judge was ultimately so pleased with Daniels' contributions, he chose to credit him as a co-creator, rather than give him the "developer" credit usually reserved for individuals brought onto a pilot written by someone else.
Initial success After its debut, the series became a large success for Fox and was named one of the best television series of the year by various publications, including Entertainment Weekly, Time, and TV Guide. For the 1997–1998 season, the series became one of Fox's highest-rated programs and even outperformed The Simpsons in the ratings that season, ranking 15th with an average of 16.3 million viewers per episode. During the fifth and sixth seasons, Mike Judge and Greg Daniels became less involved with the show. They eventually refocused on it, even while Daniels became increasingly involved with other projects.
Format change +Showrunners throughout the series' run Season Showrunners 1–2 Mike Judge and Greg Daniels 3–4 Greg Daniels and Richard Appel 5 Richard Appel 6 Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger 7–13 John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky 14– Saladin K. Patterson
Judge and Daniels' reduced involvement with the show resulted in the series' format turning more episodic and formulaic. Beginning in season seven, John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky, who had worked on the series since season two, took it over completely, tending to emphasize Judge's concept that the series was built around sociopolitical humor rather than character-driven humor. Although Fox insisted that the series lack character development or story arcs (a demand made of the network's other animated series, so that they can be shown out of order in syndication), Judge and Daniels had managed to develop minor arcs and story elements throughout the early years of the series, such as Luanne's becoming more independent and educated after Buckley's death, and the aging of characters being acknowledged (a rare narrative occurrence for an animated series).
Connection to Bless the Harts