Earlier this week, Greg Daniels and Mike Judge announced the return of “King Of The Hill” via Bandera Entertainment, their new animation company.
Bandera will produce original comedies for streaming giant Netflix and the cable network Freeform. Judge and Daniels are planning to partner with a roster of superstar comedians to pull this off: Sacha Baron Coren, Carrie Brownstein, Zach Woods, and more. Although the series creators have toyed with bringing back Hank and Peggy and Bobby and Luanne for years, the pandemic resurrected the beloved Fox sitcom. The 13-season series, which is available to stream on Hulu, re-entered the pop cultural zeitgeist in spring 2021. It was a perfect time to revisit it—we all needed some nostalgia.
Culture critic Soraya McDonald described the resurgence on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour last year. “What keeps you coming back to this show or just letting it play through for, you know, sometimes hours at a time is just how smart it is in the way that it looks at all of these characters.”
The Hill family—propane salesman Hank Hill, his wife Peggy, son Bobby, niece Luanne—will be back. So too will friends of the family, like Dale, Bill, Boomhauer, Kahn, and John Redcorn. Judge is mum on the plot and vocal roles for the reboot. (Luanne was voiced by Brittany Murphy, who died in 2009, and her husband, Lucky, was the late Tom Petty.) Series writer Brent Forrester hinted at the possible return of aging characters during an AMA session on Reddit in March 2021, but it’s all speculation at this point.
In 2007, TIME named King Of The Hill one of the 100 greatest television shows. The series aired on Fox from 1997 to 2009, a sweet-but-never-saccharine slice of life based in part on Judge’s own time spent living in Richardson, watching his neighbors—what else?—sip beer in the alley.
Stay tuned, I tell you what.
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