King of the Hill Showrunner Explains How Streaming Sped Up the Revival

King of the Hill has returned for a new season of episodes with a brand new home at Hulu, and the showrunner behind it all explained how this shift to streaming made them speed up certain events in the new season. King of the Hill has returned for a new season of episodes fifteen years after its original broadcast run with Fox, but there have been some changes made to these new episodes in the process. Some are much more noticeable like the fact that this new season has ten episodes that released all at the same time compared to the show’s much longer format from before.

King of the Hill’s episode count did jump around during its original broadcast, but the majority of the seasons at least had over 20 episodes as part of the traditional broadcast format. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about the change for the new season, showrunner Saladin K. Patterson explained that it’s still something that the creative team is still trying to figure out. For now, it’s meant that they had to speed up some of the events they wanted to take place by the end of the season like Bobby’s new romance.

How Streaming Changed King of the Hill’s New Season

As Patternson explained, changes in viewing habits is what the industry is trying to figure out as the streaming model reaches its fringes, “So a microcosm of that is this whole thing that a season is 10 episodes now, and that certainly affects the stories we can tell, but not all in a bad way.” Elaborating further Patternson explained, “In some ways, 10 episodes is creatively more refreshing than having to do 22 episodes. Trust me, the unspoken secret that we always had was it’s hard doing 22 episodes, and by time you get to episode 17, you’re starting to repeat yourself probably. But monetarily speaking, that was a great model. Now for streamers like Hulu and Disney Plus, it’s a little different.“

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As Patterson continued, this new 10 episode format made the King of the Hill adjust their plans for the new 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.” Even explaining that it sped up Bobby and Connie’s developing 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.”

How Else Did King of the Hill Change for Season 14

Patternson then explained how the new King of the Hill had to pick and choose what it showed during its episodes, “That fit to how we brought the stories and what we had to pick and choose in terms of what we showed. The word that comes to the top of my head is it makes you be more ‘efficient.’ It also makes you figure out, assuming I want to get from A to B, what in between has to be shown to make it make sense when we get to B. Versus if I had to get to A to H, I have B, C, D, E, F and G to hit along the way. It makes us have to be a little more selective with what we have our characters experience if we’re trying to get them to the same place by the end of a season.”

King of the Hill Season 14 is now streaming with Hulu, but it has yet to announce whether or not it will be continuing with Season 15 as of this time. It’s been a huge success with both critics and fans, so it seems very likely that this one is going to continue forward with at least another batch of episodes.

HT – THR