Four men stand in an alley behind a house in Arlen, Texas, drinking beer and saying almost nothing. That image opened most episodes of King of the Hill, and it explains why the show has aged better than nearly anything else that premiered alongside it. Mike Judge and Greg Daniels launched it on Fox in January 1997, and across thirteen seasons it built its comedy out of small stakes handled seriously: a lawn that needs edging, a boy who wants to do prop comedy, a neighbor who believes the government is watching him through the birds.
Hank Hill anchors all of it. He sells propane and propane accessories at Strickland Propane, treats a job most people would find unremarkable as a matter of professional honor, and finds any display of feeling physically uncomfortable. His decency is real and his rigidity is real, and the show never resolved the tension between them. Bobby is his opposite in almost every way: soft, funny, entirely unathletic, and completely unbothered by what other people think of him, which is the exact quality Hank cannot manage and quietly envies.
Dale Gribble is an exterminator and conspiracy theorist who is convinced of elaborate government plots while remaining the only person in Arlen who cannot see that his son Joseph is the child of John Redcorn. That running joke sustained itself for over a decade, and it makes Dale a specific archetype rather than a generic paranoid: intensely alert to distant threats and blind to the one in front of him. Peggy Hill is a substitute Spanish teacher whose Spanish is poor, and her defining trait is unshakable confidence in her own excellence at whatever she has recently taken up. Bill Dauterive was a high school football star and is now a lonely army barber who mostly wants somebody to sit with.
The rest of the list fills out the town. John Redcorn is a Native American healer, calm and unhurried, carrying on with Nancy Gribble for years. Nancy is a local television news personality with a warm public manner and a complicated private life. Luanne Platter is sweet, credulous and endlessly optimistic, working her way through beauty school and hosting a puppet show. Lucky is her partner, a man living on a settlement he received after slipping in a store, and he is more content than anyone else in the cast. Kahn Souphanousinphone is Hank’s Laotian neighbor, sharp, status-conscious and openly contemptuous of the men in the alley. Joseph is the awkward teenager, and Enrique is Hank’s steady coworker at the propane store.
The questions here look at how you handle rules you disagree with, praise, embarrassment, and neighbors who do things differently than you would. Answers get matched against those traits rather than against trivia, so somebody who lands on Dale is being told something quite different from somebody who lands on Peggy or Bobby. Each result comes with a short explanation of the answers that led there, which is where the comparison between characters becomes clearest.
Possible results:
- Hank
- Bobby
- Dale Gribble
- Peggy
- Lucky
- Luanne Platter
- Bill Dauterive
- John Redcorn
- Enrique
- Nancy Gribble
- Joseph Gribble
- Kahn Souphanousinphone
