Last year Disney rebooted King of the Hill on Hulu, and I went into it with high expectations that were fully met. The reception was clearly strong enough to justify another season, which got greenlit fairly quickly. Thankfully, Mike Judge and his team do not operate on the same two-year-per-season timeline that has become standard across the rest of the industry.

Season 15 does not shake things up the way the previous season did, at least not at the outset. Hank and Peggy have a comfortable nest egg built up from his years in propane, but with Hank out of the business and Peggy having stepped away from substitute Spanish teaching, retirement keeps throwing new challenges their way in terms of finding purpose and staying occupied.

The development that genuinely caught me off guard was Connie Souphanousinphone finally getting back together with Bobby in a straightforward monogamous relationship. Last season she had been in an ethical non-monogamy arrangement with Chane Wassanasong, and while she and Bobby shared a sweet moment of reconnection during season 14, they made things official right at the start of this one.

The core group of Hank, Dale, Bill, and Boomhauer has not changed much since where season 14 left off. It still takes a little adjustment hearing Dale voiced entirely by Toby Huss following the passing of Johnny Hardwick, but the performance has settled in. What I genuinely appreciate is that Boomhauer has left his days as a serial skirt-chaser behind and is now in a committed relationship with a single mother.

While last season spent a lot of energy processing Hank’s collision with post-2020 America, this one still throws a few new situations at him. One that landed particularly well involves Hank being drawn into a telemarketing scam in which the callers use AI-generated audio of Bobby’s voice to convince him that his son is stranded in a Mexican jail.

Hank Hill functions as a kind of cultural time capsule. During the original run he was a textbook Texas Republican who backed George W. Bush. I am genuinely glad Mike Judge did not convert him into a Trump supporter, and the current orange occupant of that particular political lane is never referenced. The result is that his early 2000s conservative personality keeps bumping up against the present day in ways that create an enjoyable friction.

Season 15 feels like a confident, traditional extension of what the show always was. Season 14 carried the energy of a genuine reintroduction, showing an aged-up cast navigating an Arlen that had shifted around them while Hank found himself in a world that changed without him. This season is ten short episodes and delivers consistently throughout. Looking back on both, I think I connected with last season slightly more overall, though season 15 still runs circles around the final four or five years of the original run without much effort.