King of the Hill Reboot Needs to Make a Big Change With Its Next Season

King of the Hill made its comeback with a brand new revival series fifteen years after the original show came to an end, but there’s one big issue it needs to fix if the series is going to continue with a new season. King of the Hill has had one of the most successful revival series launches in recent memory, and the animated series even ended up being one of Hulu’s most successful original animated releases of the last five years as well. But with all of that success, Hulu themselves have yet to announce whether or not it’s going to continue.

There’s certainly a lot to consider when it comes to this new era of King of the Hill compared to its original broadcast television run with Fox, and that includes many of the changes to the television and animation industries in those fifteen years. The biggest of which is the number of episodes in a given season, and that’s the case for King of the Hill Season 14. It’s a show that could really benefit from having double the number of episodes if it continues with another season.

King of the Hill Needs More Than 10 Episodes

King of the Hill Season 14 was a major shift from the original 22 episode seasons in the animated series’ past to its now available ten episodes. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about this change, showrunner Saladin K. Patterson explained how this ended up speeding up some of the longer story arcs they wanted to work out over the course of the season, “When we were breaking out the season arc, it certainly made us skip ahead, I think, in a way that we wouldn’t necessarily have skipped ahead in the first 10 episodes under the broadcast model.”

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Elaborating on this further, Patterson explained that this new number of episodes ended up speeding up the developments in Bobby and Connie’s now adult relationship, “Think about the Connie (Lauren Tom) and Bobby’s (Pamela Adlon) relationship. We wanted the season to end with them getting together, so that meant, along the way, we had to jump that relationship ahead faster than we would have had we had 22 episodes to get them together.” This made for a tighter season perfect for its streaming launch with Hulu, but it’s a much different pace than fans of the older King of the Hill episodes had gotten used to.

King of the Hill’s Slower Pace Made It Special

But what had made King of the Hill stand out from other adult animated series during its original broadcast was that much slower pace. It was a relatively quiet series in that it spent many of its episodes highlighting each of the characters in relatively small moments. It’s why fans have grown to love each of the characters, and why seeing older versions of them was such an interesting prospect in the first place. We watched them change for 13 seasons, and it feels like we’re still just getting used to the new versions of the characters seen in this new era.

King of the Hill Season 14 was incredibly successful in the stories it was able to tell, but there is a problem in that there just wasn’t enough of it. Even main characters like Peggy have yet to get an episode that was all about them (and some were missing entirely without explanation), and that was never an issue with the original broadcast run. This unfortunately might be an issue that would be nearly impossible to fix in our current streaming era of shorter runs overall, so it’s just something fans might have to get used to if the show continues. But if a future season does get the chance to add more episodes? King of the Hill should jump at that opportunity.