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.

Propane salesman, Hank, his wife, Peggy, their son, Bobby, and their live-in niece, Luanne, weren’t caricatures you could fit in a box. 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.Ĭreator 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. 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’. 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. 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.

Death of a propane salesman script