This Sunday, Fox’s King of the Hill airs its last two episodes. Year in and year out, for thirteen seasons, it has quietly been the best family comedy on TV, despite being overshadowed for many reasons: because people (and Emmy voters) have a hard time taking a cartoon seriously (compared with the funny but much more cliched and simplistic Everybody Loves Raymond); because people who can take cartoons seriously paid more attention to The Simpsons and South Park); because others couldn’t believe that Mike Judge (of Beavis and Butt-Head and Office Space) could also make a subtle, minutely detailed show about family issues and flyover-state America.
Their loss. KOTH plugged away for years anyway, and while I loved the show (and named it one of the All-TIME 100 TV series in 2007), thirteen years is about enough time to hang it up. And the two episodes it goes out on bring the show back to what it always was at heart: a story about fathers and sons.
