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Fox’s animated sitcom King of the Hill premiered in 1997, and was about a family reckoning with the pain of being excruciatingly working-class-white in a post-Reagan America. It’s famous for an opening sequence in which four white men stand in a line, in front of a tall wooden fence, sipping cans of beer as the world passes them by. This vignette is frequently repeated throughout the show’s 13 seasons, as Hank, the patriarch of the Hill family, and his three close friends, Bill, Dale and Boomhauer retreat from their homes and speak to each other in a nuanced mono-syllabic dialect that consists almost exclusively of the word ‘yup’. This is their sanctuary, their comfort zone, away from their wives, their kids, their responsibilities and most of all, from having to face the hideous, undeniable truth; that the world is so much bigger and more complex than what they’d been brought up to believe.

Creator Mike Judge first pitched the show as a satire about a southern family and their friends getting on with things in their small town of Arlen, Texas, the kind of place where Judge himself grew up. Propane salesman, Hank, his wife, Peggy, their son, Bobby, and their live-in niece, Luanne, weren’t caricatures you could fit in a box. There was no ‘stupid dad’, or ‘trouble maker son’, or ‘brainy sister’, like on Fox’s flagship animated sitcom, The Simpsons, which was hitting its peak when King of the Hill first premiered. This is surprising, as Fox had Judge bring in Simpsons writer Greg Daniels to help him flesh out the idea, and by all accounts, Daniels is largely responsible for pushing the characters away from caricature and into something that felt more human.

Hank is a traditionalist, raised by a racist, embittered father, appropriately named Cotton. Hank takes great pride in his family and his work, and is very passionate about his low-income sales job, he finds dignity in it — an uncommon trait for a sitcom dad, even today. The fact that Peggy even has a job remains subversive, especially because her work as a Spanish teacher informs her character and gives her purpose, arguably more-so than her motherhood. In fact, Bobby is a typical 90s latch-key kid, finding parental figures in extended family, friends and sometimes his dog, while his parents are distracted with work. These multiple influences pull him in so many different directions, it’s difficult to keep track of who Bobby is, but at his core, he’s sensitive, open minded, intuitive and, much to his father’s dismay, potentially a little gender-fluid.

Luanne is one of the most successful subversions of a sitcom trope the show has to offer. At first glance, she’s Kelly from Married… with Children, the same promiscuous ditz in a mid-drift with a low GPA and gravity defying blonde hair. But her sweet, lofty nature is grounded through her absent father, her dysfunctional relationship with her alcoholic mum, and the death of her boyfriend, Buckley. We come to understand that her push to be happy and accomodating comes from her fear of losing people and not being loved - a characteristic emphasised by Brittany Murphy’s soft, restrained, and often heartbreaking performance.

The authenticity and depth of these character depictions didn’t happen by accident, but through a lot of thought and effort. Luanne was Daniels’ invention, introduced as a foil for Hank’s repressed upbringing, and adding emotional intelligence into a family that had been taught to hold back. As Daniels pushed to make these characters feel like people, Judge sought to use King of the Hill as a way to engage with his own experience of Texas and growing up in New Mexico. He famously toured Daniels around small towns in Texas, the ones Judge thought the Hill family might live in, showing him the propane store Hank could work at, the school Bobby might attend, and the car Peggy would probably drive. These excursions continued through the seasons, with Judge and Daniels dragging the writers room along and forcing them to talk to townies and take notes. This extraordinary attention to detail is evident in the animation - you’re not just looking at a fence, it’s a type of treated pine picket fence popular in the 90s, sturdy, cheap and high enough to protect suburban grandmas from disaffected, drug-addled youths. It’s not just a beer, it’s the can with the gold label like the one dad drank before he had his third heart-attack.

While the idea of a subversive animated sitcom about white people in a small town sounds familiar, if not somewhat tiresome, this commitment to authenticity is an important and attractive departure from other similar series, including the one that propelled Judge’s career, Beavis and Butt-head. As Los Angeles Times critic Paul Brownfield wrote back in 2002, “the trouble with lumping in King of the Hill with South Park or Beavis and Butt-head is that although all three shows are deeply mischievous, King of the Hill is the only one with a moral centre and a deeply ingrained sense of place.”

Judge and Daniels’ collaborative effort to imbue the series with honesty and purpose comes through just as well in the characters and the world that surrounds the Hill family. The fictional town of Arlen became a faithful-as-possible recreation of a mostly white working-class family suburb in Dallas, Texas, called Richardson. This is a place that experienced a Government mandated integration of Native American people into the community from the 1950s up to the ‘80s, which gives us context for establishing Native American John Redcorn as a recurring character from the show’s inception.

Richardson also has three times the density of Asian Americans compared to the overall population in the US. Though small, the suburb even has its own China Town due to the high immigration rates of Chinese people into the region since the 19th century. Over the 90s and 2000s, as Richardson became less white, so too did the Hill family’s home town, signalled in the seventh episode of the first season, ‘Westie Side Story’, with the introduction of their new neighbours, a Laotian family, Kahn and Minh Souphanousinphone, and their daughter Connie. If there’s a question over how a show about a white family from Texas became one of the most inclusive and diverse TV sitcoms ever made, it’s possible that inclusivity was written into its DNA, if only because a culturally diverse world is a more realistic one.

This might come as a huge surprise for anyone who still watches broadcast TV, but back in the 90s, Fox was a leader in making inclusive American television, with a particular interest in broadcasting a comparatively high number of TV shows featuring Black talent, Black stories, and even Black creators. One of their first shows to go into development was comedy-drama, Roc (1991), which followed the life of a Black man who worked as a garbage collector in Baltimore, and boasted a Black director, Stan Lathan, for all of its three critically acclaimed seasons. In 1992, comedian Martin Lawrence and director Topper Carew premiered their top rating sitcom Martin. And in 1993, another huge sitcom premiered called Living Single, starring Queen Latifah and created by Yvette Lee Bowser, a Black writer and producer, whose idea was openly ripped off in 1994 by NBC, recast with white people, and renamed Friends.

In the early 90s, Fox was a fledgling network, and it was a common tactic for new networks to appeal to communities outside the mainstream in order to establish an audience and gain critical notoriety. As Gil Roberts, president of the African American Film Critics Association, explained to the Atlantic Journal earlier this year;

A real pattern emerged (in the ‘90s) where if you’re a close watcher of stuff, you can see that blackness was being used as a way to keep these networks propped up and solid until they got a hit with some show that reflected the mainstream. That happened over and over and over again with all three of those networks. Fox had … just a real robust lineup of black content. And the unfortunate thing about it is once the networks took flight, they became established off of the black talent, then they sorta just tossed the shows aside.

1997 was arguably the final hurrah for this surge in Black content on Fox. Martin was cancelled early in the year, Living Single aired its last episode on the 1st of January, 1998, and from then on, most of Fox’s shows about Black experiences made by Black people rarely made it past the pilot stage, and if they did, the characters were often moulded into gross and sometimes racist stereotypes by the network, and the shows were cancelled after one season.

In 1992, Fox produced one of the most realistic and chilling depictions of racial profiling by the police ever committed to TV. In a Roc episode titled ‘Roc Works for Joey’, Roc is hired to work in a wealthy white neighbourhood, and is subsequently arrested for no other reason than being a Black man in a wealthy white neighbourhood. But this is still the network that produced Cops, a show which capitalised on, and arguably intensified instances of racial profiling and police brutality. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that one of the only sitcoms Fox has backed since the 1990s starring Black people is Brooklyn '99, a show about adorable cops getting themselves caught up in wacky hijinks, released in 2013. From 1997 to 2000, Fox’s ‘robust line up’ of Black sitcoms were replaced with That 70s Show, Malcolm in the Middle, and Family Guy, all series made by mostly white people, for mainstream white audiences.

Premiering on Fox as the network shifted into a Trump voter’s wet dream, King of the Hill was an outlier. Yes, it was a show created by two white men, and yes it was ostensibly about a white family, however, it wasn’t made only by white people, and it certainly wasn’t made for a mainstream white audience (even if it did sometimes appeal to one). In fact, it was arguably made at the expense of a mainstream white audience, with whiteness often being framed as the punchline.

As Hank’s hot-heated neighbour, Kahn Souphanousinphone stands out in his first moments on screen as someone who isn’t going to take any of his toxic redneck bullshit. Hank asks him if he’s Chinese or Japanese, and after explaining he’s from California, but he was born in Laos, he is met with blank stares from Hank and his white beer drinking buddies. Kahn says, ‘what are you, stupid?’ and explains clearly where Laos is. But even after this thorough and exhausting explanation, Hank takes a beat, and then asks again, ‘so… are Chinese or Japanese?’ The joke is on Hank. The joke is on white ignorance.

In ‘What About the Problem with Kahn?’, Ann-Derrick Gaillot explores Kahn through Hari Kondabolu’s critique of The Simpsons’ depiction of Asian Americans in ‘The Problem With Apu’. Both Kahn and Apu are Asian characters played by white voice actors, but, according to Gaillot, that might be where their similarities end. In fact, in 2006, the Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) awarded King of the Hill for promoting positive representations of Asians in American culture, an award accepted by Chinese American actress Lauren Tom who played both Kahn’s wife and daughter. Guy Aoiki, founding president of MANAA, tells Gaillot that Kahn did the “added narrative work of showing the ignorance of the main white characters,” saying “he was a character that was confident. He didn't take crap. It wasn't what a lot of Asian-Americans fear, which is the wimpy Asian guy who gets taken advantage of. This guy was totally in control.”  

This doesn’t mean King of the Hill was a model of woke TV making. It would be a bald faced lie to say that the writers’ room was inclusive, unless you’re talking about Texans - it had plenty of those. It was overrun with what Brownfield described in his LA Times profile as a ‘subspecies’ called the ‘TV Writer’; “white guys, or mostly white guys, in their late 20s and 30s, with jobs that don’t require them to tuck in their shirts.” But one of those guys who justified Brownfield’s “mostly” qualifier was Black comedian Wyatt Cenac, best known now for his work on the Daily Show, who wrote on more episodes than anyone outside the show’s creators. Another was Fresh off the Boat writer/producer Sanjay Shah, who made his career start on King of the Hill.

Although the show began with mostly white male directors in its first season, it quickly boasted a line up dominated by Asian American and Latino directors, many of whom were women, including Kyuonghee Lim, who went on to direct Bob’s Burgers and Rick and Morty, and Tricia Garcia, who solo-directed a total of 26 episodes of King of the Hill, more than any other director on the show.

For casting, Judge and Daniels insisted on blindfolding themselves - creating a literal blind audition - so they couldn’t see the actor as they spoke in character. According to Judge, it “didn’t matter” to him what the cast looked like, they just needed to sound right. As a result, despite the series having more male roles, they landed themselves with a main cast split almost evenly between men and women actors. Even a Lebanese-American actress, Kathy Najimy, ended up playing perhaps the whitest woman ever scripted in the history of television, Peggy Hill.

Let’s be clear, though - ‘blind casting’ isn’t actually possible in a Hollywood system already dominated with white actors, producers and casting agents, and especially not at the beacon of whiter-tainment, Fox. Which is why the majority of the cast remained white, until efforts were made to cast BIPOC characters with BIPOC voice actors, adding Danny Trejo, George Takei, Victor Aaron, Johnathan Joss, Eloy Casados and the aforementioned Lauren Tom to the cast as the series unfolded. It’s worth noting too that these were not benign choices. There are multiple accounts of these cast members succeeding in bringing more depth to characters who felt a bit shallow, or even stereotyped, on the page - even to white characters, with Najimy credited as influencing Peggy’s portrayal and story arcs greatly.

Native American actor Jonathan Joss had a huge impact on the arc of his character John Redcorn, who began on the show as a white woman’s side piece, and a secret father to her son, and Bobby’s best friend, Joseph Gribble. Joss used his own musical talents to pitch Fox the idea of giving Redcorn a character arc about entering the music industry and even starting his own band (a band that became so popular in real life, Joss later toured the music as “The John Redcorn Experience”). Joss described the situation back in 2013 to Indian Country Today, saying;

It was all about changing the approach that King of the Hill had with John Redcorn. They liked the idea of him being a running joke, a good laugh of climbing in and out of the window. After a while of doing that, I felt they were wasting a good character that could have an arc and tell a story other than being a one-punch joke… I was able to communicate through (my music) to Fox, and they allowed him to have his band and to have an arc in a different place.

…Native characters… aren't allowed to arc like that. People have hit me over the head, saying I was that character sleeping with the white lady and having a kid I don't care about; but I tell him you didn't see King of the Hill after the first few seasons. Redcorn changed.

It would be a struggle to find a Native American character on a TV show in 2020, let alone one with as much complexity and heart as Redcorn. Episodes centred on the character are lauded as some of the show’s best, including ‘Spin the Choice’, a fifth season Thanksgiving special in which Redcorn attempts to connect with his estranged son (who doesn’t realise he’s Native American), and fails. At a time when Fox was sidelining Black people, People of Colour and Indigenous people as artists and creators, Joss managed to build a Native character that still has an impact today, influencing art and music, and becoming a role model for people whose identities don’t fit into the narrow box media calls the ‘mainstream’. This is maybe exemplified in Hip Hop artist SiR’s touching tribute song called John Redcorn, released in April this year, with an animated homage to Redcorn’s tragic love story as its music video.

Thanks to Joss’s efforts fighting back against Fox, John Redcorn doesn’t exist in the zeitgeist as the butt of tired, racist joke — but as a legend. As Gaillot writes, there’s a serious “human cost” to casting white actors in BIPOC roles. Conversely, Joss proved there can be endless benefits to casting BIPOC actors to voice their own stories.

In 2010, after 13 seasons, King of the Hill was cancelled by Fox, replaced with Seth McFarlane’s Family Guy spin-off, The Cleveland Show. This animated sitcom about a Black family boasted three white male creators, a white actor cast in the title role, an almost all white male writers room, and a long list of almost all white male directors and producers (with the exception of a couple who came onto the show from King of the Hill after it was canned). It’s painfully ironic that a show about a white family made for a culturally diverse audience was replaced with a show about a Black family, made for… racists? It’s unclear who The Cleveland Show was made for, but it certainly wasn’t made for Black people. I think critic John McWhorter said it best in his scathing The New Republic review when he called the series “Family Guy in black face”.

In true King of the Hill style, I’m breaking the fourth wall here to say that as a writer and producer, I’ve come to understand true inclusivity as not the stories we tell, but the ways in which we tell them. McWhorter admits that his frustrations begin with there being nothing in Cleveland’s story that we hadn’t already seen in the creator’s other animated sitcoms about white families, speculating that “just maybe this could have worked out if MacFarlane and company had gone to the trouble of creating an interesting new world for Cleveland.”

What King of the Hill offers us, that The Cleveland Show doesn’t, is a new perspective. Hank Hill is a kind, well-intentioned man, and we want to root for him, but the subtext is always that his world-view is warped. In ‘Luanne’s Saga’, a first season episode in which Hank is confronted with a sobbing, freshly dumped Luanne, he advises her to deal with the break-up by not crying. “Every time you have a feeling, just stick it into a little pit inside your stomach and never let it out,” he tells her.

After attempting this, Luanne asks, “are you supposed to feel this pain under your ribs?”

“Yes, that’s natural.” Hank replies.

Even in the framing, we’re rarely seeing things through Hank’s eyes. We’re in stead looking at Hank, usually from the point of view of another character, and sometimes directly from their eye-line. When Kahn calls out Hank and his friends for being stupid because they think the entire continent of Asia is made up of only two countries, we see these four grown men through Kahn’s eyes, and they look wide-eyed, slack-jawed and small - like children.

When we’re asked to see things through Hank’s eyes, it serves a purpose. An episode that haunts me is season 3’s ‘Jon Vitti Presents: Return To La Grunta’, infamous for depicting Hank being raped by a dolphin. With it being a sitcom, we’d expect such a situation to be played for laughs, but instead what we’re give is a layered exploration of rape culture and trauma from sexual assault. In the same episode, Luanne is assaulted at her new job, and Hank’s dismissiveness over the situation feeds into her trauma. When his own assault is treated like a joke, Hank comes to see the world through Luanne’s eyes, and suddenly we begin to see the world through his. The ugliness of the people around them making rape jokes, and telling them to just get over it, is suddenly and purposefully revealed.

Of course, this episode isn’t perfect. In the end the lesson from Hank is to give perpetrators a taste of their own medicine, throwing the man who assaulted Luanne into the dolphin’s pool, setting him up to be raped as well. This isn’t played for laughs, but it is played out as a victory for both Hank and Luanne, and as an appropriate response to the situation. In fact, the dolphin is celebrated as a kind of hero.

As Brownfield says, King of the Hill is a show with a moral centre, but that morality is never fixed to one person or one idea, and while Hank’s stubbourn reliance on ‘eye for an eye’ justice is well within his character, the decision to frame his actions from his perspective makes it clear that Simpsons writer Jon Vitti didn’t do the work behind the scenes to understand that this particular ‘revenge rape’ trope is both ubiquitous in the media, and incredibly toxic.

As the series progressed, and as more women and BIPOC were given creative control of the show, the behind the scenes became a more inclusive and educated space, and these mixed messages became less frequent. The show opened itself up to the world, just as Hank does. The first episode opens with four white men standing around a broken down truck, sipping beer and saying ‘yup’. In its finale, ‘To Sirloin with Love’, directed by Kyounghee Lim, the series closes with Hank using his propane grill to cook up some burgers for his family, neighbours and friends. He’s no longer attempting to find sanctuary from the mess of the world behind a spiked wooden fence. In fact, he’s invited that messy world over for lunch.

Critic Danny Gallagher writes of the finale; “It kept the characters honest, true and humble in their own unique ways and sent the audience off exactly where they started -- by being funny and fresh without being cheap or crass in their caricatures.” The cast and crew behind King of the Hill went to the trouble of creating an “interesting new world” for a white sitcom family, and it’s a world that we can still learn from today.

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