TV

'King of the Hill' bows out

By Dale Roe
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, September 13, 2009

When I moved to Texas exactly 10 years ago (this is where, historically, y'all go fire up your Dell computers and write the "Yankee go home" hate mail) I knew next to nothing about the state. Most of what I did know came from watching "King of the Hill," the animated Mike Judge comedy that's ending its 13-season run at 7 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 13 on Fox.

If it weren't for Hank, Peggy, Bobby, Luanne, Bill, Boomhauer, Kahn and my namesake, Dale, I would have expected to have stepped off the plane at Austin-Bergstrom and walked straight into a "Road Runner"-esque cactus. As it was, I imagined that the antics of the cartoon Hill family and their friends from fictional Arlen were likely, well, cartoonish — you know, exaggerated for comedic effect (could anyone love propane that much?). After 13 years, I look back at my younger self and think, as Hank Hill would say, "that boy ain't right."

"King of the Hill" turned out to be a gentle, sometimes poignant, often hilariously accurate depiction of mundane life in the Lone Star State (although, in my neighborhood, we drink beer in the front yard). Like Hank Hill himself, Texas is earnest, wise and sincere — a big ol' softie wrapped in a rough exterior. Time magazine was spot on when it wrote, in naming "King" one of the top 100 programs of all-time, that "the show sees modern America's fine detail like an electron microscope."

When I learned that rumors of Fox reviving "King of the Hill" (it had been canceled and saved before) or that another network might pick up the show were untrue, I decided to mourn by rewatching the Emmy award-winning Season 3 ("King" won for outstanding animated program), which aired just before my move here.

For every contrived episode that season (the Mega Lo Mart explodes; consistently overreaching Peggy enters a beauty pageant; Hank and his buddies become volunteer firefighters) there is an equally touching and funny, character-driven story as good as anything on television (Hank takes son Bobby hunting as a rite of passage; Bobby falls in love with an older classmate while Hank and the gang develop a parallel infatuation with a discarded sofa; lonely Bill hits rock-bottom during the holidays).

Judge and company's clear affection for the residents of Arlen goes a long way toward explaining why the show boasted more than 200 episodes while that crew's recent "The Goode Family" tanked so quickly. Hank Hill was no less a stereotype than liberal Gerald Goode, but he was a complex, well-rounded stereotype. It would have been easy for Judge to make the Hills one-note punch lines but, in spite of the most low-rent animation on television, the Hills were more real than many characters in live-action sitcoms.

All the emotion never kept the show from being funny. The writing was stellar and the most humorous lines — such as Hank telling the guys that Bobby "quit sports and joined a soccer team" — were underplayed, almost subliminal ... delivered as throwaways. Still, "Hill's" plots were becoming increasingly repetitive and the characters so thoroughly explored that now really is a good time for them to bow out.

The cancellation of the second longest-running prime-time animated series in television history (after "The Simpsons") makes way for "The Cleveland Show" — more Seth MacFarlane lunacy that's basically another half-hour of "Family Guy." It's nothing like "King of the Hill," but I suppose that's the point, Fox knows where its ratings bread is buttered, and it's not in Peggy Hill's kitchen.

Sunday's series-ending episode (the second of two, running back-to-back) is not a "finale" in the worst sense of the word — there are no tearful goodbyes, nor life-changing events; no cut-to-black over Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" — but provides a fitting end to the Hills' first-run adventures, a realization that they will live on in syndication and the feeling that, while we won't be able to watch, the bonding, bickering and barbecuing carries on in Arlen. Like the best episodes, it has a strong emotional core and a deep affection for its characters (and its characters for each other) as Hank and Bobby bond over their mutual love of meat.

It's enough to make a man want to try propane.

Yep.