Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is the Refreshments’ “Yahoos and Triangles” from the King of the Hill opening and closing credits.

Even though I hate binge releases (I blame the binge model for the cancellation of Rutherford Falls and the demise of Star Trek: Prodigy), I finished watching two weeks ago all 10 episodes of King of the Hill’s new season, which Hulu released in a binge drop 16 years after a subdued and heartwarming series finale closed the book on fictional Arlen, Texas, and I thought in 2009 that King of the Hill would never come back.

Revivals of live-action sitcoms are rarely worth watching. SCTV’s memorable “Leave It to Beaver 25th Anniversary Party” sketch imagined in 1977 how unappealing a Leave It to Beaver reunion project would look if it were in color instead of black-and-white and the real world after Leave It to Beaver’s final episode on June 20, 1963 intruded on Mayfield, the Cleavers’ fictional hometown. The Beav was now a depressed grown-up on welfare, Wally was divorced four times, and Ward was a drunk old man. Yet that didn’t stop Jerry Mathers, Tony Dow, Ken Osmond, Frank Bank, and Barbara Billingsley from starring as older versions of their characters on The New Leave It to Beaver.

The revival wasn’t as charming as the original (a show that, despite an annoying laugh track, remains more watchable than most sitcoms from its era and had a great villain in the form of Eddie Haskell, Wally’s best friend), and it killed off Ward off-screen because Hugh Beaumont, who played him, died before the filming of Still the Beaver, the 1983 TV-movie that kicked off The New Leave It. But Leave It to Beaver fans who were overjoyed to see the surviving cast members again on a weekly basis didn’t care, and The New Leave It somehow lasted for four seasons of no scenes where June says, “Ward, I think you were a little hard on the Beaver.”

Meanwhile, a couple of revivals of animated sitcoms have been a little more successful (at picking up where they left off) than something like The New Leave It or The New WKRP in Cincinnati or the show that should have been called Frasier Sans Niles, Daphne, Martin, and Eddie because 1) animation can eliminate the problem of actors who look too sluggish and old to be reprising their roles or doing any kind of work, period, and 2) the writers who worked on these revivals haven’t lost their touch or are newcomers to the show who are skilled at introducing it to a new generation.

The 2020s King of the Hill under new showrunner Saladin K. Patterson, a name I recognize from his years as a writer for Psych, is one of the revivals that work. The 14th-season opener’s premise that Hank Hill, the old-fashioned Texan and emotionally repressed propane—and propane accessories—salesman, and Peggy Hill, the narcissistic substitute teacher wife he adores (and the hapless Bill Dauterive continues to nurse a crush on), both retired after working for 10 years in Saudi Arabia and are now moving back to a completely changed Arlen is a brilliant way to reintroduce Arlen to viewers who last watched King of the Hill in weeknight syndication or on Adult Swim.

“For those of us on the left, Texas is an old flame we can’t quit. We love the music, the food, and the charm of small towns that have a Dairy Queen, a high school football stadium, and a ghost story. But it’s hard to not be horrified by the politics, the cruelty, and the fact that somewhere, a state lawmaker is introducing a bill that begins with ‘Any books with the word ‘slavery’ in the title…’ ‘King of the Hill’ is a reminder that Texas isn’t only that,” wrote Texas journalist Brian Gaar in a piece for The Barbed Wire that praises the show’s new season. “It’s also family, neighbors, and people who mean well even when they don’t understand the thing they’re trying to mean well about. It’s block parties, state fairs, and barbecue joints where the owner calls you ‘darlin’’ whether you’re 25 or 75. It’s people on jet skis rescuing their neighbors after a hurricane. The reboot captures that perfectly, showing Hank rediscovering Texas in a way that’s as sweet as it is funny.”

Also, Patterson, a Black writer, has finally fixed the only problem I, an Asian American viewer, had with the show’s first 13 seasons: All the Asian male characters were voiced by white actors. Those roles have now been taken over by Ronny Chieng, Kenneth Choi, and Ki Hong Lee.

I don’t give a shit that Chieng and Choi don’t sound at all like Toby Huss, who previously voiced both Kahn Souphanousinphone and Ted Wassanasong. I don’t want them to sound like Huss. Kahn was a social-climbing Laotian dad whose nuanced characterization won over Asian viewers like the famously hard-to-please Guy Aoki from MANAA (Media Action Network for Asian-Americans) and Canadian animation teacher Alison Reiko Loader. In her 2010 Society for Animation Studies Conference essay “Representation, The Model Minority & Whiteness on King of the Hill,” Loader wrote, “Although Kahn especially is portrayed as a marginalized and intolerant bigot (perhaps to demonstrate that protagonist Hank Hill is not), I can’t help but enjoy (and almost admire) this Laotian American as he breaks the model minority rule of Asian silence, and the white rule of self-control, to complain about the unfairness [towards Asian Americans] that surrounds him.” Kahn and Ted should have always been voiced by Asian actors.

The part-Indigenous Joseph Gribble, now the roommate of Bobby, Hank and Peggy’s only child, is also voiced by an actor of color for the first time. Tai Leclaire takes over as Joseph after Brittany Murphy, who voiced Luanne Platter, Peggy’s niece (one of too many great King of the Hill voice actors who passed away), and Breckin Meyer portrayed younger versions of Bobby’s best friend.

I didn’t watch King of the Hill regularly, but I watched it often when it was part of Fox’s Sunday night “Animation Domination” lineup. I said last week that WKRP was about a generation gap (between the Silent Generation and the boomers), until creator Hugh Wilson and his fellow writers got sick of dealing with it and just wanted to write about other stuff (like Venus’s life outside the DJ booth). King of the Hill was always about generation gaps (but the show’s writers never got sick of dealing with them). Hank was always encountering something that made him go…

One week, it was Bobby’s idolization of a dreadlocked nu-metal star. Another week, it was the word “sex” (uttered by Luanne when Hank tried to warn her, in a manner in which he wouldn’t have to say that word, to watch herself around a middle-aged pork magnate who invited her over to his estate to talk to her about offering her a job). Then there was the week Hank objected to Bobby and a 13-year-old blond girl grinding at a boy band concert. What kept Mike Judge and Greg Daniels’s creation from becoming an unwatchable, Tim Allen-esque sitcom that fawns over conservative dads was that Hank and his uptightness were the butt of the joke every other week.

But Hank was normal and reasonable compared to the toxic and inflexible parenting of Cotton, his WWII veteran dad, and he was open to embracing different cultures. In one of my favorite episodes, 2008’s “Lady and Gentrification,” Hank took on the task of giving a speech about Inez, the teen daughter of Enrique, one of his Strickland Propane co-workers, at her quinceañera, and when Enrique (voiced in that episode by Danny Trejo), his wife, and Inez were in danger of being pushed out of their house by annoying white hipsters Peggy brought to their barrio, Hank—with the help of his friends and a remorseful Peggy—restored the barrio to its original, hipster-free state by scaring away those fuckers who, to Enrique’s horror, put salmon in the barrio’s fish tacos.

Hank continues to be open to embracing different cultures in the new season while also being uptight around 2020s things like homebrew beer, bike lanes, and restaurants that don’t use propane grills. My favorite 14th-season King of the Hill episode, “No Hank Left Behind” (written by Stephanie M. Johnson), reunites Hank with G.H. (Good Hank), his now-teenage half-brother (now voiced by Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things), and gets the Hill brothers entangled in the manosphere, which Hank initially finds to be appealing—until his common sense kicks in and he realizes that the manosphere sucks and that G.H.’s Andrew Tate-esque new idol reminds him too much of Cotton. Hank’s takedown of the manosphere is classic King of the Hill. It’s as classic as his defiance against a shrill anti-Halloween fundamentalist voiced by special guest star Sally Field or his line about Christian rock.

It’s a solid season that proves that King of the Hill was worth reviving, and it has caused me to go back and rewatch a bunch of episodes I haven’t seen since King of the Hill was in weeknight syndication. I’ve also watched a bunch of episodes I never saw before. Bobby’s present-day job as a chef at Robata Chane, a Japanese/German fusion restaurant he opened in Dallas (“Irasshaimase and willkommen!” is how he greets customers there), made me watch for the first time the 2002 Thanksgiving episode “Goodbye Normal Jeans,” which contains the origin of his cooking skills. I had no idea that his interest in cooking began at a home ec class.

Watching old King of the Hill episodes on Hulu has made me notice how different the animation under the now-defunct Film Roman in the show’s first seven seasons on Fox looks from the animation under Bandera Entertainment, Judge and Daniels’s animation studio and the same studio behind the current Adult Swim hit Common Side Effects, in the show’s current Hulu era. Film Roman and its collaborators permanently switched to digital animation in King of the Hill’s eighth season (2003-04). The work of Bandera and the Korean animation studio Yeson Entertainment is closer to the show’s more polished look from 2003 to 2009. Fourteenth-season episode director Kelly Turnbull said on Bluesky that the animation in the Hulu era “is handled like traditional cel animation would have been, just drawn in Harmony [software] rather than on paper.”

I kind of miss how King of the Hill used to look more like the cartoons Judge submitted to SNL and Spike & Mike’s Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation (Dale Gribble was, in fact, based on the late Mike Gribble, half of Spike & Mike) and Judge’s earliest Beavis and Butt-Head shorts for MTV. I love how Bobby and Luanne’s shocked reactions to accidentally damaging the carpet in the house during Hank and Peggy’s absence in the first-season episode “Peggy the Boggle Champ” are very early ’90s Judge.

Not everyone has gotten over the show’s switch to digital animation.

“I do want to address the art because that’s probably been the most universal thing that has shook the new audience when they saw the previews and things like that — that the animation looks so different,” said Patterson to The Hollywood Reporter about King of the Hill fans’ mixed reactions to how the 14th season looks. “I get it, and I get why people who want to revisit the show may be taken aback a little bit. The new animation style is all digital now, but the truth of the matter is, it is impossible to do the show now the way it was done then. The hand-drawn animation, the water colors, those don’t exist anymore. If they exist, they certainly don’t exist at a cost where you can do a TV show. So it has to be updated, and so we updated it with the current style and makeup of animation that animated shows do. I admit it does look different and maybe jarring to some people. I just want to put out there that even though it’s updated, we still went and tried to give it an age old look, to make it feel more like the color palette and the landscape of the original, more so than other shows. We certainly went through a lot of back and forth with the background designers and things like that, to make our colors feel closer to what they felt in the original and the tones and things the most that we could.”

Despite what Patterson said about the efforts to recreate the color palette and the landscape, the animation—particularly in one scene at the Bush Museum in “Bobby Gets Grilled”—has lost a little bit of the personality Film Roman’s animators were told to bring to the characters by the meticulous and frequently updated King of the Hill animation guide that often gets reposted by the show’s fans. But otherwise, I’m not as negative about the 14th-season animation as others are. It has its moments. My favorite bit of animation from the new season is Joseph folding himself into a ball to hide in a trash bag while he and Dale try to stake out the house of a homebrew beer competition judge they want to blackmail in “The Beer Story.”

This college-age Joseph is one of the funniest characters in the new season. Irasshaimase and willkommen back, King of the Hill.