King Of The Hill EP Gives Us An Update On Hulu's Revival — Will Kahn Be Back?
Hank Hill's next-door nemesis might return for the King of the Hill revival, but if he does, he'll sound a bit different.
Greg Daniels, who co-created the long-running Fox animated series with Mike Judge, gave us an update on Hulu's upcoming revival, which was first announced back in January. Daniels, who is an executive producer on the revival along with Judge, says that work was already underway on it before the dual writers' and actors' strikes brought Hollywood to a halt earlier this year: "We had table-read two episodes, and it was a lot of fun and everybody was very excited, and then we all went on strike."
But now that the writers' strike has been resolved, Daniels and the writing staff are back at work "rewriting the third episode or the fourth episode and getting notes on the first episode. Yeah, it's chugging along." Still, he doesn't expect the revival to actually make its debut on Hulu until "the beginning of 2025," since the actors' strike is still underway. (A source tells TVLine that 2025 is a possibility, but a premiere date has not been locked in yet.)
Most of the show's original voice cast is returning to reprise their roles, including Judge as Hank, Kathy Najimy as Peggy, Pamela Adlon as Bobby and Stephen Root as Bill. (Brittany Murphy, who voiced Luanne, died in 2009.) But Hank's Laotian next-door neighbor Kahn was conspicuously missing from the revival's character list — perhaps because the Asian character was originally voiced by white actor Toby Huss. Since then, The Simpsons' Hank Azaria has famously stepped aside from voicing the Indian character Apu, and several other animated shows have recast white actors who were voicing Black characters. So will Kahn be a part of the revival at all?
Daniels says he's "not sure whether Kahn's coming back. But I think we would most likely replace Toby's voice for Kahn. Like, if we were casting today, we wouldn't have cast him. But we cast it in 1997." As he points out, "most animation casts play multiple roles, and Toby Huss initially played [Hank's father] Cotton Hill and was cast for that, and then Kahn came up later. And most productions, especially back then, didn't have the budget to to hire a special performer for each voice. But it's different now."
The King of the Hill revival will be missing another original cast member as well: Johnny Hardwick, who voiced Hank's pal Dale Gribble and passed away in August. As TVLine reported, though, Hardwick was able to complete work on "a couple" of episodes of the Hulu revival prior to his death. (With additional reporting by Vlada Gelman)
Do you want to see Kahn return for the King of the Hill revival? And who should play him? Join us in the alley — er, the comments — below to share your thoughts.