Judge-mental

Beavis's inventor hits the sticks

by Matt Ashare

KING OF THE HILL. Airs Sunday nights at 8:30 p.m. on WFXT.

It's hard to imagine a more potent contemporary animation team than the one currently collaborating on the new Fox series King of the Hill. The show brings together the talents of Beavis and Butt-head creator Mike Judge, fresh from his big-screen effort Beavis and Butt-head Do America, and Greg Daniels, a former co-executive producer of The Simpsons whose triumphs include Emmys for his writing on The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live and a Writer's Guild Laurel Award for a fantastic episode of Seinfeld titled "The Parking Space." It would also be hard to beat the show's prime(time) placement -- it's sandwiched right between the popular Simpsons and top-rated The X-Files on Sunday nights at 8:30. But if the first few installments of King of the Hill are any indication, Judge and Daniels are taking nothing for granted, least of all the loyalty of their respective fans. Their strategy seems based not on the overnight success of MTV's Beavis and Butt-head but on the slow, steady emergence of NBC's Seinfeld.

Set in the fictional Texas suburb of Arlen -- a bastion of white-trash values that could even be around the corner from Beavis and Butt-head's living room -- King of the Hill alludes to Seinfeld in its opening episode. Boomhauer, who's the closest thing Arlen has to a hipster, stutters and mumbles his way through some incomprehensible, vaguely laudatory patter about how Seinfeld is "a show about nothing." He may yet turn out to be King of the Hill's Kramer. If nothing else, he's blessed with one of Judge's best voices since Beavis's out-of-control "Cornholio" alter ego.

But so far, despite its unusually measured, even laid-back pace, King of the Hill hasn't been a show about nothing. The first episode introduced the central characters, the nuclear Hill family, through a drama involving Hank Hill's comfortably dysfunctional relationship with his 12-year-old son Bobby, some nosy neighbors, and an incompetent social worker. Episode two dealt thoughtfully with a scandal over a sexual-education class in the local middle school; Hank's wife, Peggy (Arlen's 1996 substitute teacher of the year), was placed in the uncomfortable position of having to teach the class herself.

The issue-oriented plots have been more than just a pretense for generating controversy and laughs. Hell, Daniels and Judge have already proven themselves more than capable of both in the past. Not that there aren't plenty of one-liners to go around in King of the Hill. At a little-league game Hank tells his son not to let the pitcher walk him because that's "playing lawyer ball." And when Bobby asks his father why boys are supposed to have sex and girls aren't, Hank responds without a bit of irony: "It's called the double standard. Don't knock it. We got the long end of the stick on that one."

If you're sensing a little Archie Bunker in Hank's persona, then you're not far off the mark. Like Archie, Hank is self-righteously proud that he "works for a living" (selling propane and propane accessories); he's socially conservative, distrustful of government bureaucrats, suspicious of outsiders, and prone to impatient outbursts. Oh, and his bark is much worse than his bite. But like All in the Family, King of the Hill is evenhanded with its wit. Judge and Daniels aren't interested in simply skewering suburban redneck culture, even if Hank's neck is quite red from afternoons spent hunched over his Ford pick-up and riding a lawnmower around his modest yard. If anything, the show has been crueler to the ivory-tower liberals who show up from time to time to harass Hank and his family. Mostly it finds a middle ground between the anti-government Michigan-militia-style paranoia of Hank's dimwit neighbor Dale and the smug superiority of the equally misguided state social worker.

So where does all this fit in the Simpsons/Beavis and Butt-head continuum? Well, King of the Hill looks an awful lot like Beavis and Butt-head. Dale could pass for an older, wiser Butt-head, Boomhauer for a community-college-educated Beavis. And with its family-centered plots, it's set up like The Simpsons. But its creators seem to be aiming for something that transcends the cartoon limitations of both. It's going to take time for Simpsons and Beavis and Butt-head lovers to get used to the decelerated pace of King of the Hill, and for non-fans to realize that there's more to Hank Hill than meets the eye. But what else is there to do between 8:30 and 9 p.m. on Sunday?