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Is there life after propane?

That’s one of the things Hank Hill is struggling to find out in Hulu’s King of the Hill revival. The new season opens with Hank returning to Texas to embrace life as a retiree. If you’re familiar with the original series, then you know that Hank doesn’t feel happy unless he’s productive, which makes retirement an existential crisis.

According to showrunner Saladin Patterson, the idea of Hank retiring wasn’t something he and the writers took lightly. In fact, they had toyed with the idea of keeping him at Strickland Propane or giving him a new career altogether.  

“Some of the interesting debates that we had in terms of figuring out what we wanted to see, things like, how retired is Hank,” Patterson says during an interview with Popverse. “Do we want Hank to have a new job, do we want Hank to try something else, or is he really going to try to fully embrace retirement? Do we want to still see him at Strictland Propane?”

There were similar discussions surrounding Bobby, who runs a restaurant in the new season.

“In terms of the Bobby character, we have to figure out how much dating do we want Bobby to be doing. Is that something that we feel fans want to see? He’s a young adult, and that’s certainly part of their world. And then, what do we want his living situation to be like. He and Joseph, are they going to be roommates? Staying at home is something we had to think about.”

In the end, Patterson opted to place Bobby in another city, making Hank and Peggy empty nesters. “It made more sense since his restaurant is in Dallas to kind of be on his own there, but we had to figure out to what extent. It was really more knowing that fans wanted to see these characters, and see the characters that they loved, but we wanted to take advantage of the fact that we age things up and have fun with what makes sense for these characters to be doing now. A lot of that still had to be discussed and decided on.”

Patterson says the difficulty was giving the viewers something new while remaining true to the characters and the original series. “When you’re doing a revival like this or whether we’re bringing another show back, you always have to kind of figure out, why now. And part of the why now question is what are we going to give people different than what they saw before. But then at the same time, you have to keep things consistent so that people see and recognize the show that they knew and loved.”

King of the Hill is streaming on Hulu.

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