In its original televised run, from 1997 to 2009, the animated show King of the Hill aired 259 good-to-great episodes about the Hills, a folksy and well-intentioned family living in small-town Texas. That’s a lot of TV, and those looking for a representative moment—one that summarizes the entire show, more or less—might pick an exchange from the third-season episode “Three Coaches and a Bobby,” in which the stodgy patriarch, Hank, attempts to explain to his son, Bobby, why soccer is a stupid sport. Hank is a Dallas Cowboys diehard; the idea of Bobby getting into the Premier League sends him into full-body shivers. But rather than take offense or rise to his father’s provocation, Bobby fixes his old man with a placid look and asks: “Why do you have to hate what you don’t understand?”
During those initial seasons, King of the Hill drew much of its humor from how Hank’s values clashed with modern society—for example, his inability to understand why anyone would enjoy, as he put it, a sport “invented by European ladies to keep them busy while their husbands did the cooking.” But the living personification of the changing times was Bobby. The younger Hill was a sensitive and proudly chubby tween boy—not good at fighting or football, but handy with a sewing machine and a master of prop comedy. Hank, who was born in the 1950s or ’60s—cartooons tend to be vague with ages—grew up in an era with a very fixed view of how men should think and behave. To paraphrase Tony Soprano, he was the Gary Cooper type, strong and silent. Bobby, whose age hovered between 11 and 13, was by contrast a Millennial—part of a generation that had more freedom to do things differently, and that would come to be consistently misunderstood by its elders.
The new season continues probing that tension between father and son—not by picking up where the original show left off, but by vaulting forward into the future (a rarity for animated programs, whose characters often remain fixed in time). Hank and his wife, Peggy, are now retired in present-day Texas; Bobby is 21 years old and living on his own. Although this age technically categorizes him as a Zoomer—the show has been off the air for 16 years, but it has chosen to age its characters less than a decade—Bobby still behaves like a Millennial. At one point, he describes himself as “hashtag thick,” slang ripped right out of an old BuzzFeed post. And his anxieties seem propelled by a fear of winnowing potential, the feeling that he might be left behind. Watching him, I was struck by how aptly he channeled the unease of a generation reaching middle age while still lacking many traditional signposts of adult life. Yet he’s also inimitably Bobby—sweet, congenial, a little goofy—which makes his trajectory in these episodes all the more endearing, because it’s rooted in believable growth.
In earlier seasons, Bobby was sometimes the centerpiece of a plot, but he was just as often relegated to delivering a well-timed quip in service of another character’s storyline. Now he’s become a co-headliner, appearing substantively in each episode of the new season. The shift may partly be logistical: Luanne, Hank’s angelic and naive niece who filled out the Hill family, was voiced by Brittany Murphy, who died in 2009, and her role was not recast out of respect. But the refocus on Bobby allows the show to use father and son as foils for each other. Just as Hank remains confused by the things he doesn’t understand—such as the expected courtesy of rating your ride-share driver five stars, when he’s really done more of a four-star job—so is Bobby lightly out of step with his own peers, forcing a similar confrontation with his own principles.
Right away, we get a sense of how his experience differs from others in his age cohort. Whereas many of them are off at college, Bobby is instead the executive chef and a co-owner of Robata Chane, a Japanese-German restaurant; he works long hours for not much money. In the first episode, a flirtatious customer invites Bobby to a frat party, and they end up going home together. The next morning, when he tries to set up a future date, she makes it clear that their hookup was a onetime, rhythm-of-the-night type of thing. Here was a moment that could indicate how the show meant to portray Bobby: If he should project hurt, perhaps the show would tilt toward a judgmental “kids these days” perspective on evolving sexual mores. Instead, pleasant surprise dawns on Bobby’s face—this is not such a bad outcome, even if he might have liked a second date. He is still the boy who is open to new experiences, not someone who has been hardened by adulthood.
Yet he is not unconditionally tolerant; like his father, he draws some lines in the sand. Early on in the season, he reconnects with Connie, a middle-school sweetheart who is now going out with Chane, his business partner. At one point, he obtains evidence that Chane may be cheating on Connie—which, he then learns, is a moot discovery, because the two of them are practicing ethical nonmonogamy. Connie explains how it works, in a dutiful and credulous way, and to Bobby it sounds like nonsense. Because he cares for her, he can’t help but express his distaste for the arrangement, edging uncomfortably close to slut-shaming—“the worst thing” a person can do, Connie tells him, aghast at his response even as it seems to leave her less assured about her own behavior.
This is subtle character work that, as described on the page, might seem hectoring or prescriptive. But King of the Hill has always been more of a good hang, rooted in the organic interplay of recognizable personalities, than a laugh factory. Back in the day, its sister shows on Fox were The Simpsons and Family Guy, two punch-line-heavy shows with lots of cutaway gags and surreal touches. Both of those shows starred young boys, Bart Simpson and Chris Griffin, who never got older, and whose immaturity was a pointed feature; you could, and can, count on them to behave and react the way they usually do. Watching Bobby mature into a young adult—as many viewers have since the show first premiered—is a different experience, and perhaps the best reason to tap in.
These scenes aren’t funny, per se. What is funny—has always been funny, will always be funny—is the texture of Bobby’s voice. None of this would land without the heroic voice acting of Pamela Adlon, who subtly dials up his boyish vocal fry into the rasp of a grown man. Bobby sounds like a born sweetheart, someone whose heart is pure and whose frailties are relatable—not a smart aleck or a dullard or an agent of chaos. Another plot point this season concerns Hank’s teenage half brother, Good Hank (it’s a long story), who gets swept up in the manosphere. Bobby would never, I thought while watching this subplot play out. He’s too old-fashioned to completely get with the times, and too attuned to his own sense of right and wrong to give into peer pressure. In this, like countless sons before him, he walks the path toward becoming a fresh iteration of his father, bringing the show full circle.
The new season knowingly acknowledges that it is asking viewers to sit with the years that have passed for the Hills. Television revivals are always good for a healthy whiff of nostalgia, but the routine may quickly become tired. In the season’s finale, Bobby wonders if Connie might “only like the 12-year-old husky version of me,” rather than the man he’s become. Connie, thankfully, brushes off this fear—Bobby is the bravest person she knows, she says, because he’s doing exactly what he wants. He still has plenty of road to burn: Financial stability would help, as would the time to do his laundry. (He still drops off his dirty clothes at his mom’s.) But this self-awareness is meaningful, as it was for his younger self. You believe that he’ll keep growing, and that he’ll weather whatever storms may come, because he understands who he is.
The post Bobby Hill Has Finally Grown Up. Kinda. appeared first on The Atlantic.
