"6 AM and already the boy ain't right." - Mike Judge as Hank Hill
King of the Hill: The Complete Second Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
After a successful first season run as a midseason replacement beginning in January of 1997, King of the Hill returned for its first full season the following fall. The show about decent working class folk in Arlen, Texas, continued to attract an audience, almost cracking the top twenty for the season, and outperforming its flashier timeslot mate, The Simpsons.
Season two continues the adventures of the Hill family - cautious, conventional propane salesman Hank (voiced by Mike Judge), his minutely more liberal wife, substitute teacher Peggy (Kathy Najimy), his impressionable son Bobby (Pamela Segall), and his beautician wannabe niece Luanne (Brittany Murphy) - and their circle of oddball friends and neighbors - including paranoid Dale (Johnny Hardwick), inscrutable ladies' man Boomhauer (Judge), and emotionally stunted Bill (Stephen Root).
In season two, King of the Hill's creators strike a more consistent tone than in the show's inaugural run. As the personalities of the characters begin to gel, the show seems more realistic and believable, even during its most outrageous moments. The beauty of the series is that the creators are able to effectively strike a balance between sending up the characters' rube-like behavior without condescending to the characters or dehumanizing them. Indeed, the show allows us to relate to the characters in a way that embraces our own inner-rube rather than setting up the characters in such a way that causes us to feel superior to them. (This, of course, is the opposite of a show like The Beverly Hillbillies in which we were expected to laugh at the Clampetts' otherness and their intellectual inferiority).
One of the best aspects of season two is the dynamic between Hank and his misfit son, Bobby. Hank consistently tries to relate to his son, but his rigidity is too often at odds with Bobby's freewheeling curiosity. Hank is the king of repression. He refuses to let Peggy hang his underwear out to dry on the backyard clothesline for fear that the neighbors will see his unmentionables, and in another episode he chastises Luanne for allowing their underwear to fraternize in the same washing machine. Bobby, on the other hand, is willing to try anything once. Whether he is trying on a wig he found at a garage sale or sitting in the front yard in his underpants after throwing out his hunting dungarees in protest, he seems to have lost the "shame" gene that so plagues Hank.
Bobby's underpants incident occurs in "How to Fire a Rifle Without Really Trying," the season's first episode. At the county fair, Hank is despondent when Bobby proves to be a failure at most of the carnival games. He cannot even throw a pingpong ball without almost taking out a carny's eye. Hank becomes elated when he discovers Bobby's hidden talent for shooting a gun. Bobby's sharpshooting skills earn him the booth's biggest prize. Proud that he now has a manly hobby to enjoy with his son, Hank begins to take Bobby to the shooting range for target practice. Soon they have been entered in the Father/Son Fun Shoot sponsored by the Arlen Endowment for the Arts. Hank has a secret, though - thanks to demons from his past, he cannot shoot to save his life.
In episodes like "How to Fire." and the excruciatingly funny "Hilloween," the creators make effective use of flashbacks to further understand Hank and Bobby's father/son dynamic. In his own childhood, Hank was terrified of his mean father, shin-less WWII vet Cotton (Toby Huss). This makes his attempts to bond with and understand his own son even more poignant. At the same time, it also calls into question the rosy childhood he often talks about.
The other characters are also given their own moments in the spotlight. Luanne - who brings a guaranteed laugh each time she is onscreen - literally takes center stage in "Meet the Manger Babies." When her loser of a boyfriend, Mega Lo Mart worker Buckley (David Herman), treats her badly, Luanne finds solace with a set of animal puppets she finds at a garage sale. Soon she has created "Manger Babies," a show that looks at the lives of the animals that were in the manger when Jesus was born. Of course only in Luanne's world is it conceivable that an octopus and a British penguin would have been hanging around in a Bethlehem stable. We learn even more about Luanne when her fork-wielding ex-con mother Leanne shows up in "Leanne's Saga," only to break the hearts of both Luanne and toe-fungus afflicted Bill.
Peggy becomes an ever so slightly liberated woman in "Peggy's Turtle Song." In it, Bobby is diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Disorder when he gets hopped up on an entire box of sugary breakfast cereal. He gets prescribed mood altering drugs that turn him into a Rainman-like idiot savant so attuned to his environment that he can sense milk going bad through a closed refrigerator door. Feeling as if she caused Bobby's problems because she did not provide enough parental support, Peggy quits her job as a substitute teacher. She is soon bored with being a stay at home mom, so she decides to take guitar lessons from a local punk grrl. Peggy writes a song about a turtle trapped in her shell, which her teacher believes is an indictment against marriage. This episode is a fun mix of light social commentary (the Peggy portions) and whopping belly laughs (everything with Bobby).
Season two continues the King of the Hill's tradition of subtle yet funny visual gags. In "Traffic Jam," Hank is forced to take a defensive driving class to avoid an insurance increase after a minor fender bender. Each time he drives into the parking lot where the class is being held, we see an overhead shot of horribly mis-parked cars. When a cold snap brings an insignificant snow flurry to Arlen, Luanne is seen wearing a fur muff.along with her usual sports bra and Capri pants. The season's final episode, the explosively funny "Propane Boom, Part I," is a dead on parody of primetime soap opera cliffhangers, but one of the most amusing moments is a throwaway gag that reveals Chuck Mangione's "dressing room" to be a bureau in the Mega Lo Mart table department.
One of the only problems with the second season is that it is increasingly noticeable that the same actors provide voices for many characters. Unlike The Simpsons, where the same group of performers can give breath to a wide variety of unique-sounding characters, there is a sameness to the voices in King of the Hill. Stephen Root's Bud Strickland, for example, mostly sounds like Bill with very little variation. This is true of other minor characters voiced by the other actors. A small flaw, indeed, but a distracting one.
The twenty-two episodes that make up the second season of King of the Hill are divided onto four discs. There is a "play all" feature, or the episodes can be chosen individually. The episodes are divided into chapters. The menu designs are not as interesting as those in The Complete First Season, but they still remain simple and effective.
