King of the Hill

HANK Hill, a forty-year-old employee of Strickland Propane in the nondescript suburb of Arlen, Texas, is in a fix. His somewhat slow 12-year-old son, Bobby, has a black eye, and his wife, Peggy, a welt on her forehead. Hank is famous around the neighborhood for his temper, displayed recently at the hardware store when he berated a listless teenage clerk. Soon, rumors are swirling around about abuse in the Hill household, and someone calls a social worker.

Ordinarily it wouldn't take much imagination to guess who the hero of this particular story will turn out to be -- except the scenario is from the pilot episode of the refreshing new animated series on Fox TV, King of the Hill. The social worker is a twenty-something latte-drinker fresh from Los Angeles. When typing, he wears huge braces on his wrists to protect himself from carpal-tunnel syndrome. A poster of OSHA regulations hangs on his office wall. Fielding the complaint about Hank Hill, he explains to the caller: "I wish I could, ma'am, but the system says we can't take custody of the boy without a home visit."

During the home visit, all the social worker's worst fears appear to be confirmed. Hank Hill becomes enraged at the visitor's accusatory questions and at the fact that his wife blabs about his narrow urethra. So when Hank kicks this "twig boy" out of his house, the social worker recommends that the state take custody of Bobby. The misunderstanding gets untangled, but not before Bobby uses his new-found leverage over his father, telling Hank when he scolds him: "Dad, that's not respectful adult - child dialogue."

This is rare television, a program that takes the side of a middle-class, beer-drinking suburbanite with a taste for lawn mowers and power tools and absolutely no patience with permissiveness. Outside of Cosby and a handful of other shows, middle-class family life is generally derided even by programs about families, like Roseanne, an ode to PMS feminism, and Married with Children, with its relentless vulgarity. As King of the Hill creator Mike Judge told Time magazine, "I've met so many people who work in the movies and in TV who come from upper-middle-class New England families, and they're really out of touch with what the rest of the country is thinking."

Judge is also the creator of MTV's Beavis and Butt-head, which is about the part of the country that is not thinking at all. In Beavis and Butt-head, Judge already showed a taste for smashing icons. The protagonists won't be included in any William Bennett anthologies, but given the pleasure they take in splattering frogs with baseball bats, their utter objectification of women, and the atrocious way they treat their fey, sandal-wearing high-school teacher, liberals don't have much to like either.

Indeed, one of the beauties of that show is that it's a satire of the moronic teenage culture of MTV. The character Hank Hill is a derivative of Beavis and Butt-head's neighbor Mr. Anderson, who is usually exclaiming, "What th' hell are you boys doin'?" In effect, in King of the Hill the perspective just switches from that of the sex-starved teenage deviants to that of their law-abiding neighbor, who instead of the hapless victim is now the undisputed leader of his group of friends (including Dale, a bumbling black-helicopter conspiracy theorist) and of his household.

It's the social worker's threat to the latter that makes Hank Hill so irate. The same goes for the local school's sex-ed requirement in the show's second episode. Judge sympathizes with Hill in both these disputes, which really go to the heart of the contemporary skirmish over the family. Child abuse is so often hyped by liberals because it implies that 1) social workers know best and 2) middle-class suburbia masks a cesspool of patriarchal repression and depravity. Sex-ed is another favorite because there is presumably no better proof of the backwardness of parents than their reluctance to have their kids taught the latest in sexual practices.

Well, Hank Hill can raise his boy just fine on his own, thank you very much. In Judge's hands, even Hill's old-fashioned fatherly emotional distance is endearing. At the urging of his wife, at one point Hank struggles to express his "unconditional love" for Bobby. "Uh, you, uh, you're my son. Uh, well you know with everything, uh, that entails. Uh, huh, you know, uh, feelings of fondness and more, heh, uh, you know what I mean, don't you, boy? . . . Uh, I, you, uh, family. You're not making this easy on me, boy. Uh, OK --I-love-you-no-matter-what-you-do. There! Whew! Let's go get something to eat!" It's not a sophisticated statement, nor does it reflect a man particularly "in touch with his feelings," but that Judge celebrates it nonetheless is the charm, and self-effacing wisdom, of King of the Hill.

COPYRIGHT 1997 National Review, Inc.
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