1 of 6 | From left, Peggy and Hank Hill, Dale, Bill and Boomhauer return in “King of the Hill,” Monday on Hulu. Photo courtesy of Disney/Mike Judge
Kathy Najimy and Toby Huss said the characters they voice in King of the Hill, Season 15, premiering Monday on Hulu, are still real after all these years. Last year’s Season 14 was a revival for the series after its 2010 Fox finale.
Nine years have passed in Arlin, Texas, but that is long enough for Hank (Mike Judge) and Peggy Hill (Najimy) to be retired. In a Season 15 episode, Peggy copes with menopause.
In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, Najimy, 69, said she has always appreciated when the show addresses real issues with which the characters would be dealing.
“I love it when they make Peggy real,” Najimy said. “I love it when they talk about things people can relate to in real life.”
Showrunner Saladin K. Patterson, 53, said the show’s female writers contributed to the menopause episode but not, however, from personal experience.
“We don’t have any female writers that have gone through menopause,” Patterson said. “So I want to be on the record saying that.”
Women shared stories from sisters and mothers, but male writers were able to contribute to the episode too.
“Because a lot of that was from the point of view of Hank as well, we leaned on those of us husbands whose wives are going through it just as much,” Patterson said. “We made sure to make the experiences authentic though and that we weren’t mansplaining menopause.”
Huss, 59, recalled Najimy’s track record of fighting for Peggy stories. The menopause episode is only the latest.
“Even though the writing was great, it was still Kathy saying, ‘Hey, let’s keep making her more human. Let’s not make her just the wife,'” Huss credited his costar. “It was Kathy adding her own Kathyness to that thing that’s made Peggy so special and so strong and so vibrant.”
Najimy added that not every project she’s done in her career has been so collaborative.
“Our writers are so good and so wanting to work together, if you have an idea, they’re not offended,” she said. “It’s always the writing. The writing I appreciate so much and we hit the jackpot with this.”
The move from Fox to Hulu allows for more profanity than Fox. Peggy and Dale in particular say the S-word or A-word, but never the F-word.
“It’s been fun expanding their relationship and seeing what those knuckleheads can get up to after so many years,” Huss said.
Patterson confirmed it was important not to suddenly make King of the Hill too edgy.
“We may add a few curse words here and there but Hulu actually made a strategic decision that because of the fan base of the original, they wanted to still be a family show,” Patterson said. “You’re allowed to curse, you’re allowed to show nudity or whatever, to stay underneath the TVMA rating we still are keeping our show pretty contained.”
Where Peggy is going through physical changes, the world has changed around Dale. Dale was always the conspiracy theorist, and Season 14 revealed that he has joined Substack. Huss said Dale now represents more of the mainstream than the fringe.
“What I like is watching how sadly, in a way, how the country has caught up with Dale’s way of thinking about the world,” Huss said. “We’re largely a conspiracy-minded, paranoid country now just like Dale’s been since the late ’90s.” So the country’s caught up.”
Hank and Peggy’s son, Bobby (Pamela Adlon), has grown up and opened a restaurant. Hank’s catch phrase, “That boy ain’t right,” has caught up too.
“We are putting a twist on it to where it’s Hank saying, ‘That grown man ain’t right’ or making a reference to ‘that boy ain’t right’ but not literally saying it though,” Patterson said.
A sitcom veteran since Frasier on NBC, Patterson recalled that the classic Diff’rent Strokes set limits for instances of Gary Coleman’s catch phrase, “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” King of the Hill is not that strict, but doesn’t want to overdo it.
“We just kind of feel it out and police ourselves,” Patterson said. “We probably put it in and take it out.”
Judge’s other main character, Boomhauer, still speaks the same way he originally did, mumbling sentence fragments interspersed with “dang old” and gibberish. Patterson explained the method to Boomhauer’s madness.
“What I like to do when I am policing the Boomhauer dialogue is a couple of words so we understand the point he’s trying to make,” Patterson said. “Then there needs to be a jump or a skip to where the final word where he lands or concept that he lands on represents a decision or twist or something that he skipped over.”
Huss took over the role of Dale when original voice Johnny Hardwick died in 2023 after recording seven episodes in Season 14. Huss still feels responsible for Hardwick’s legacy.
“Hopefully, I’m sitting in this world that Johnny created really comfortably now,” Huss said. “It’s a character that Johnny made from nothing. He had a drawing and he had the drawing of some friends of this guy and he made a whole character.”
Prior to King of the Hill, Najimy experienced another revival when Disney+ produced Hocus Pocus 2 29 years after the original. Whoopi Goldberg had announced a Sister Act 3 in 2020 but Najimy still awaits a script.
“I hear little mumblings of it,” Najimy said of Sister Act 3. “We haven’t said yes to anything because there’s nothing that’s concrete yet but that would be so much fun to do.”
