Fox cancels, Cartoon Network acquires King of the Hill
Atlanta’s Cartoon Network acquires long-running animated sitcom ‘King of the Hill’ to anchor a new hour of Adult Swim programming, beginning in January of 2009.
The king is dead, long live the king! Hot on the heels of the Fox Network’s Oct. 31 announcement that the current, 13th season of “King of the Hill” would be its last, Atlanta’s Cartoon Network declared that the animated sitcom set in the heart of Texas would anchor a new hour of Adult Swim programming:
Starting in January, 2009, “King of the Hill” will kick off Adult Swim every night at 10 p.m... “With ‘King of the Hill’ joining ‘Family Guy’ in our Adult Swim lineup, we now have two of the greatest animated series ever made,” said Mike Lazzo, senior vice president of programming and production for Adult Swim.
The second longest-running animated series in history (behind, of course, “The Simpsons”), “King of the Hill” has been one of television’s most underrated programs since its debut in 1997. It didn’t help that Fox so frequently bumped “King of the Hill” for football and sports events that even a die-hard fan like myself lost track of when it aired, but with luck it’ll find a new audience among Adult Swim fans. “Beavis and Butt-Head” creator Mike Judge and Greg Daniels (who has found new success with NBC’s American version of “The Office”) offer an extremely affectionate portrayal of “Red State” America, with propane salesman Hank Hill serving as a middle-American everyman at odds with the excesses 21st century. Compared to Archie Bunker’s reactionary buffoonery on “All in the Family,” Hank proves to be more sympathetic and open minded, “I tell you what.”
The first scene of “King of the Hill’s” pilot name-checked “Seinfeld” as “a show about nothing,” and “King of the Hill” followed suit as one of the most deadpan, realistic animated series ever made, which should provide a welcome counterpoint to the aggressive surrealism of the original Adult Swim shows. My favorite “King of the Hill” regular remains conspiracy-buff Dale Gribble, one of the strangest, funniest characters of any animated sitcom, who rather resembles “Doonesbury’s” Uncle Duke, if the character were a security-obsessed, cuckolded exterminator in Arlen, Texas. In this recent clip, Hank, Dale and their pals discuss the MySpace phenomena: