Time flows differently on TV. For example, it’s been 15 years since the last episode of King of the Hill aired, but only eight years have passed on Rainey Street in Arlen, Texas.
That’s how long Hank and Peggy Hill have been away in the gap between season 13 and the brand-new season 14. Reviving the Fox classic comedy about lower-middle-class Texan life for Hulu, the show returns Aug. 4 with many familiar faces and voices.
However, there are some newcomers, like showrunner Saladin K. Patterson. He may be best known as producer and writer on live-action shows like Psych, The Bernie Mac Show, The Big Bang Theory, and The Last O.G., but he’s no stranger to animation. One of his very first writing gigs was on Eddie Murphy’s Claymation series The PJs, and he has a lost project on his résumé that was actually his first experience with the kind of 2D animation that King of the Hill uses.
So at least Patterson walked into the KOTH production offices knowing the first half of the animation production process, and was eager to learn about the rest of the pipeline. “I leaned on a lot of people who had more experience than me on the animation production side,” he said. “I’m not afraid to ask questions. I’m never afraid to ask questions, because I think if you don’t know something you will always look like you don’t know it, whether you think you do or not.”
At the same time, it’s not like Patterson hasn’t worked on a lot of half-hour sitcoms, including three seasons on Frasier. “There are similarities between live-action and animation,” he said. “How the writer’s room works, breaking stories, coming up with creative content, coming up with the direction of the show, all of those things gratefully are things that I’m very experienced with.” Moreover, he had Daniels, who had brought him on the project in the first place, to lean on. Patterson said, “When he did the first King of the Hill, he too had come from live-action only, so he knew the kind of seat I’d be sitting in and knew how to walk me through things.”
“It’s Hank Hill, still. It’s still Peggy, it’s still Bobby even though he’s grown up now, it’s still Dale, it’s still Bill and Boomhauer.”
What makes the new season exciting for returning voice actor Lauren Tom is that the series doesn’t just pick up where the original left off, but it acknowledges the passage of time, placing all the returning characters in a new context. “There’s so many more stories to tell because they did that,” she said. “It opens up the whole world.”
It’s a reunion for many beloved characters, and that also means most of the original cast are back, including Kathy Najimy as Peggy, Pamela Adlon as Bobby, and Stephen Root as Bill Dauterive. However, not everyone was behind just one character. For example, series co-creator Mike Judge voiced both Hank and Boomhauer. Similarly, in the original run Tom played mother and daughter Connie and Minh Souphanousinphone (the latter a part she called a tribute to her grandmother), while Toby Huss was the show’s utility pinch hitter, voicing a series of characters including Connie’s dad, Kahn Souphanousinphone Sr., Hank’s dad, Cotton Hill, Strickland Propane driver Joe Jack, and more.
The return sees major shifts for Huss. Cotton died in the original run, and now Kahn will be voiced by comedian and series newcomer Ronny Chieng. Huss called him “really funny, and great as Kahn,” and he did not give Chieng any guidance or advice. “He needs to feel comfortable [with] the character that he’s making. I laid down some things and he can use them or discard them as he sees fit.”
Meanwhile, Huss is taking over as conspiracy theorist Dale Gribble, after the death in 2023 of the original performer, longtime Austin comedy mainstay Johnny Hardwick, who also served as a writer and script editor on the original run. Hardwick was originally part of the revival and had recorded six episodes before his death, as confirmed by the producers during the ATX TV Festival. Hardwick and Huss were also friends and often recorded their lines in the same room. “I watched Johhny for 13 years doing this role,” Huss said. “He didn’t come at this from an actor’s standpoint. He was a writer and a stand-up, and he was a really inventive, unique, authentic guy with a weird, wonderful take on this character, so it was important for me to not just mimic him.”
It’s inevitably a different situation to what’s happened with Kahn. While Huss was eager for Chieng to find his own version of his old character, when he started approaching Dale “it was important to retain a lot of the Johnny-ness of Dale and add my own thing to it. … It was about trying to pay respect to the character that he made all those years ago.”
While Huss was working on new characters, Tom’s first job was to work out what this older Connie actually sounds like, and it turned out she already knew. “I’m basically using my own voice ‘cause she’s in her twenties. It was more challenging back then when I had to be 12.” She credited producer Greg Daniels with helping her find pre-teen Connie’s voice by doing more with less, going a little higher and a little more reserved than her own voice. “Sometimes when you think that you have to do someone a little bit younger you have to put something on instead of just going back to when you were 12.”
Just as the actors had to age up how their characters sound, so Patterson and the production team needed to put their older selves on the screen, and that’s where that sense of continuity was important. Of course he had Daniels and Judge to rely on, but the producers also brought back veterans like writer Norm Hiscock and supervising director Wes Archer to keep everything new rooted in the old. For example, to age the residents of Arlen, Patterson said, “We had to tweak the character designs. Bobby was a completely new design still based on the original.”
Making such changes, both visual and audible, are all part of the gig in an animated show. Very early on in the original run, Huss realized that he had to calm down on Cotton’s cranky yelling because it was tearing up his throat. “I remember thinking, wow, this is something you have to deal with, buddy, if this show goes.”
And go it did. While it may have started, as Huss puts it, as “you with your friends doing some voices,” it became a truly iconic series, and over time the team understanding how much it meant to audiences. For Huss, that realization hit when he was talking to an Australian friend of his who knew from his days in New York in the late Nineties who had moved to Austin. “He said he would meet women in bars in Austin and tell them he knew the guy that did the voice of Cotton and Joe Jack. He used that to, let’s say, his romantic advantage and I never did. It was at that point that I realized that, my goodness, this guy is getting laid for knowing the guy that does Cotton.”
For Tom, there was an extra joy to being able to represent the Asian American community in one of the biggest animated shows on TV. “It was exciting, being a person of a color, to have people come up and just say that it was a joy for them to see themselves in Connie and Minh – mostly Connie – being Asian American. It still hits me.”
King of the Hill season 14 debuts on Hulu on Aug. 4.
This article appears in August 1 • 2025.
