King of the Hill Season 15 will be released on July 20 on Hulu and Disney+.
If the 13 original seasons of King of the Hill were great and last year’s 10 new episodes were even better, Season 15 of the animated masterpiece is something else entirely: a rare season of television that is somehow better than everything that came before it.
When King of the Hill returned in 2025 after a 16-year hiatus, it was a spectacular, if not jarring, homecoming for one of the greatest animated series of all time. The characters that we had come to love over 13 seasons were suddenly back in our lives, aged up and facing new challenges big and small. They were the same Hank, Peggy, Bobby, Dale, Nancy, Boomhauer, Connie, Minh, Khan, and Bill that we’d always known but they, like the rest, of us had evolved.
Hank was semi-retired after he and Peggy spent years building a nest egg in Saudi Arabia. Bobby was the head chef at a Japanese-German fusion restaurant in Dallas. Connie was in college. Dale had served a stint as mayor of Arlen. Bill, well, he was still Bill.
As that season progressed we moved past the excitement the new episodes provided and slowly sank into the warm bath of the King of the Hill we’d always loved, even if the characters had changed and grown. If Season 14 was slightly burdened by being novel (Hank and Peggy moved to Saudi Arabia! Look at how much older Bobby is! Will we get answers about what happened to Lucky and Luanne?), Season 15 is completely unshackled from any need to explain, indulge, or prove anything to anyone, and stands as one of the most expertly crafted and profound seasons of television of the past 20 years.
The show walks a tightrope of being one of the few animated series that actually allows its characters to change and grow while still feeding its audience a steady diet of what truly makes the series great -- a beautiful, steady rhythm of slice-of-life stories and familiar characters that resonate episode after episode.
In true King of the Hill fashion, every episode of Season 15 centers around a storyline that is instantly relatable: Hank is annoyed that someone keeps parking their electric truck in front of his house; Hank is frustrated that the toothpaste is locked up at Mega Lo Mart; Bobbie and Connie decide to “hard launch” their relationship; Hank and Peggy get scammed; Dale raises chickens; Hank and Bobby visit a fan convention; Peggy experiences menopause; etc. Yet nothing ever feels tired or dull. The beautiful writing and expert voice acting are always hand-in-glove, so realistic and relatable that you often forget that you’re watching a cartoon.
Mike Judge (Hank, Boomhauer) and Kathy Najimy (Peggy) are still at the top of their game after all this time. They deftly lean into their characters’ golden years and breathe life into every “yep” and “ho-yeah!” There’s nothing particularly new that they’re doing here, but their continued grasp of what are easily career-defining characters after nearly three decades is a testament to their incredible skill. Similarly, Pamela Adlon (Bobby), Stephen Root (Bill), Ashley Gardner (Nancy), Lauren Tom (Minh, Connie), and the rest of the cast continue to shine. Adlon and Tom in particular excel in aging up their two main characters in a nuanced way. Thanks in no small part to their performances, Season 15 lets us grow more comfortable with the grown-up versions of Connie and Bobby as Tom and Adlon transform them into distinct yet familiar versions of the characters we love.
Similarly Toby Huss, who took over voicing Dale Gribble from Johnny Hardwick, who passed away in 2023, has fully come into his own as the lead voice for one of the show’s most iconic characters. In Season 14, Huss shared the role with Hardwick, but this season it's fully his. I’ll admit that it was originally a bit of a jolt to hear someone new voice Dale last year. But over the course of Season 15, Huss flawlessly performs the difficult task of paying homage to Hardwick’s creation while making Dale fully his own.
Outside of the core group of characters, Season 15 is full of fan-favorites who we haven’t seen in a while. Hank’s Strickland Propane colleagues Joe Jack, Booda Sack, and Enrique come to Hank in a bind late in the season. Hank’s propane nemesis M.F. Thatherton makes an appearance. Reverend Stroup shows up for an episode. Even ne'er-do-well Jimmy Wichard makes a cameo.
Beyond returning characters, the new episodes are jam-packed with Easter eggs and callbacks to the show’s original run. King of the Hill Season 15 threads the needle of giving diehard fans nearly everything they could possibly ask for while never digging too deeply into gimmicks or fan service. For example, we see the return of Bobby’s ventriloquist dummy, Chip Block, a character tries out to be a sports mascot, Bill joins another cult-like organization, and the list goes on.
But none of these callbacks drag the show back into the “glory days” or lean too heavily into sentimentality. They’re just lovely moments in a well-executed show that acknowledge the love that fans have for what the cast and crew have created. And therein lies the magic trick of King of the Hill: It knows exactly how to let their characters learn, grow, and progress through life while never shying away from what made the show great to begin with.
The series is not the same as when it premiered or even when it first went off the air. In Season 14, Hank and Peggy walk in on Bobby and Connie in flagrante. There’s a plethora of wonderful, appropriate and hilarious cursing (at one point, Peggy exclaims “Shit on a shingle!"). In another episode, characters gleefully consume what, in the '90s, would have been considered an illicit drug. But King of the Hill is still the show we’ve always loved. There’s still heart, warmth, and plenty of propane.
Never is that more evident than in the season finale. Dating back to the beginning of last season, the one minor nitpick I had with the King of the Hill reboot was that it thrust us right back into the characters' lives without explaining much about what had happened in the intervening years. Episode 10 of Season 15, titled “Propane Recall,” sees Hank’s former colleagues pull him back into the propane game to help save their flailing business.
What follows is a near-episode-long flashback showing a good chunk of what happened during the eight years of screen time between Seasons 13 and 14. Revisiting Hank, Peggy, and the gang as they were years ago is heartwarming, even if 16-year-old Bobby had a bit of a punk phase (blue hair and all). We get numerous answers about why Hank took a job in Saudi Arabia, why Bobby became a chef, and more. There’s even a brief mention of Luanne and Lucky (voiced by the late Brittany Murphy and Tom Petty, respectively), which I won’t spoil here, but it ties together a few loose ends and serves as a simultaneous gut punch and touching moment. The whole sequence is a reminder of why we loved the show during its original run and why we still love it now.
Season 15 of King of the Hill is as perfect a season of television as you could hope for. The team behind the show has taken a beautiful prime cut of story, coated it in top-tier vocal performances, and expertly grilled it on an open (clean-burning) flame of nostalgia, heart, and warmth. For fans of the series, or just good storytelling in general, it’s lightyears beyond whatever you could ever possibly want from a new batch of episodes. And given the show’s history, that’s no small task, I tell you what.
