Hank Hill is the steady center of King of the Hill, the character the entire series quietly orbits around. Created by Mike Judge and Greg...
Hank Hill
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King of the Hill is an animated comedy franchise created by Mike Judge and Greg Daniels for Fox. It follows Hank Hill, an assistant manager at Strickland Propane, along with his family and neighbors in the fictional town of Arlen, Texas. The comedy comes from ordinary life rather than outsized premises, built around Hank selling propane and squaring off against a world that keeps shifting faster than he would like. What started as a single Fox sitcom now covers the original 13-season run, a Hulu revival, one official video game, and a loose shared universe with Bless the Harts.
Hank Hill: A propane salesman who runs on hard work and doing things the right way, even when the right way makes his life harder.
Peggy Hill: A substitute Spanish teacher whose confidence runs well ahead of her competence, which is most of the joke.
Bobby Hill: Hank and Peggy's son, a soft, funny kid who never fits the mold his father expects and mostly stops trying to.
Dale Gribble: An exterminator and conspiracy theorist who misses the one real conspiracy in his own house, his wife Nancy and John Redcorn.
Bill Dauterive: A lonely, divorced Army barber usually one bad idea away from a small disaster.
Boomhauer: A fast-talking bachelor whose mumbled drawl only Arlen seems to follow, voiced, like Hank, by Mike Judge.
The original series aired on Fox from January 12, 1997 to May 6, 2010, running 13 seasons and 259 episodes. It leaned away from the loud, cartoonish style of its Sunday-night neighbors and stayed close to the ground, finding stories in propane, pest control, high school football, and church politics. Arlen felt lived in, and the Hills felt like a family with actual history.
Part of what set it apart was a willingness to let time pass. Over the run Luanne lost Buckley in the Mega Lo Mart explosion, Cotton died, Lucky married Luanne, and Joseph grew up. Characters aged and changed instead of resetting to the same starting point every season, which is rare for the format and became one of the franchise's signatures.
Hulu revived the franchise in 2025. Season 14, the first revival season, premiered August 4, 2025, and Season 15 followed on July 20, 2026. Hulu has since ordered two more seasons, carrying the show through Season 17. The revival picks up years later, with Hank and Peggy returning to Arlen after a long propane job in Saudi Arabia and Bobby grown up and running his own restaurant in Dallas.
The revival keeps the original tone rather than modernizing it into something unrecognizable. The animation is cleaner and the references are current, but Hank is still Hank and the alley still anchors the whole thing. For a full breakdown of the newest season, see the King of the Hill Revival Season 2 review.
King of the Hill has only one official video game. Flying Tiger Development released it for PC and Mac on November 13, 2000, and it packaged two separate modes. Texas Huntin' was a hunting simulator built around the Arlen Hunting Club, and Hootenanny was a collection of Fourth of July minigames featuring the Hills and their neighbors. It is sometimes listed as King of the Hill: Block Party.
The game was simple and never landed as more than a curiosity, and no follow-up ever came. That scarcity is its own piece of trivia. The Simpsons spawned a long shelf of games across nearly every platform, while King of the Hill, after more than 250 episodes and two Emmy wins, produced exactly one and then nothing else.
The franchise's one real universe expansion is Bless the Harts, the Fox animated sitcom that ran from September 29, 2019 to June 20, 2021. Creator Emily Spivey, who wrote for King of the Hill in the early 2000s, confirmed that her North Carolina series shares a universe with Arlen. The link is loose and mostly runs through a single shared detail, the Mega Lo Mart chain, the same superstore whose Arlen location blew up and killed Buckley in the original series. Spivey said she cleared it directly with Mike Judge.
It is not a spinoff, and the two shows never stage a full crossover, but the connection is on the record and it is the closest thing King of the Hill has to an extended universe, all because of that one superstore.
King of the Hill lasted because its humor came from people rather than trends, and that approach aged well. Its grounded, slice-of-life style shaped the animated sitcoms that followed, most directly Bob's Burgers, which picked up several King of the Hill writers after the original cancellation and is often called its spiritual successor. The strong revival numbers on Hulu, a record adult-animation premiere for the platform, suggest the appetite never really went away.
Hank Hill is the steady center of King of the Hill, the character the entire series quietly orbits around. Created by Mike Judge and Greg...