This week saw the finale of King of the Hill, the tale of a humble Texas propane salesman, his self-righteous substitute teacher wife, and their dumpy yet wildly flamboyant son. The prime time cartoon narrowly dodged cancellation about a million times earlier in its run (roughly three years ago I interviewed its co-creator Mike Judge–you know him better from Office Space and Beavis and Butt-Head–before a previous scheduled termination), but the axe was bound to connect eventually. And, like so many of the show’s fans, I missed its finale’s scheduled airing. So it was with King of the Hill: inevitably overshadowed and never must-see TV…yet every time I stumble upon a rerun I remember what an extraordinary accomplishment it is.

Here’s King of the Hill’s appeal in a nutshell: in an age when television–and adult-oriented cartoons in particular–relentlessly pushed every possible boundary (who can forget the South Park episode where the kids hire a prostitute to give their parents herpes?; my still traumatized mother sure can’t!), King of the Hill is incredibly sweet. This sweetness is never mawkish; even the most sympathetic characters have hard edges. (When people reach out to their neighbor/ perpetual loser Bill Dauterive, he never cheers up but instead drags them down into his abyss of misery before they leave him alone again.) Most of the characters, like our own friends and relatives, gradually reveal themselves to be completely insane, notably Hank Hill’s wife Peggy, who offers constant and unconditional support…unless she suspects someone is on the verge of outdoing her, in which she tries to destroy them (including her own child in a few terrifying episodes). Yet we always sense that she means well; she simply can’t help it.

Propane salesman Hank Hill is the anti-Tony Soprano: the more we see him, the less monstrous he appears. Deeply conservative politically and in every other way, we gradually see hints of how decidedly non-whitebread his world really was (there’s an extraordinary childhood flashback of his crippled World War II veteran father Cotton–“They opened fire and blew off my shins!”–smashing a sink full of dishes with a chair while Hank’s mother obliviously polishes her collection of glass miniatures as a teenage Hank watches in horror; it makes Tony’s recollections of his finger-severing father seem like It’s a Wonderful Life). Yet we also watch Hank reexamine his beliefs in an attempt to do right by the people around him, even as he far too often finds himself utterly unappreciated. I remember reading a review of Howard’s End that noted Emma Thompson deserved an Oscar for making decency interesting; Hank Hill does the animated American male version of the trick.

Most importantly, King of the Hill was funny. Incredibly funny. Unforgettable episodes include Bobby taking a women’s self-defense class and running around kicking people in the groin while screaming, “THAT’S MY PURSE!”, Hank going temporarily blind after walking in on his now divorced mother making love to a Jewish retiree, and the neighbor Dale Gribble buying a hawk who for some reason will only attack Bill Dauterive. We witnessed the passionate (yet utterly chaste) romance of young Bobby and his Laotian neighbor Connie, who deep down we suspected was just too good for him. We saw Dale’s TV meteorologist wife Nancy end her 14-year affair with the devastatingly studly Native American John Redcorn in oddly touching fashion. We heard Peggy show off some extraordinarily bad Spanish, which ultimately saved her from a Mexican prison (though humiliated her in front of leading telenovela star Monsignor Martinez).

Goodbye, King of the Hill. As Hank himself put it during one of the show’s tenderest moments: “Bobby, if you weren’t my son, I’d hug you.”

__ of the Moment appears Wednesdays.

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