King of the Hill aired the final episode of its original run on Sept. 13, 2009, when then-President Barack Obama still enjoyed a double-digit net approval rating, the BlackBerry was still the premier smart device, and Donald Trump seemed to be fading permanently from public life as The Apprentice‘s schtick wore thin.

At the risk of staring like a bovine Buddha into the middle distance and invoking the good old days like series protagonist Hank Hill, something seems to have gone awry since that moment — the antisocial, social media-induced cultural spiral, a national dumbing-down of educational standards, and the legacy of economic inequality and immiseration that the Great Recession left festering in its wake. This is the world that Hank and his family return to in a series continuation that brings them back to Arlen, Texas, circa 2025, an updated caricature of series creator Mike Judge’s native cookie-cutter Dallas suburbs.

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When King of the Hill premiered in 1997, it was out of step not only with the animated sitcoms that preceded it (The Simpsons) and followed it (South Park, Family Guy) but also with Judge’s signature creation, Beavis and Butt-Head. With the exception of The Simpsons‘s slyly erudite Ivy League-baiting satire, those series all amplified the inherent crudity of TV animation to depict an American lowbrow that drooped ever closer to the dog-s***-covered pavement in the era of Jerry Springer, the Lewinsky scandal, and the inexplicable popularity of Andy Dick.

On the other hand, King of the Hill was, on the surface, a knowing, good-natured satire of north Texan culture, but, at heart, a gentle family dramedy about the social and emotional struggles of a man so repressed by traditional Texan masculinity that he barely registered those struggles’ existence. In the fifth episode of the new series, the ethos of Hank is summed up when a neighbor awards him with the man’s highest possible compliment after a round of youth soccer refereeing: “You knew the rules and didn’t cry.”

It’s easy for King of the Hill‘s creative team, which brought back many of the show’s original creators, to find modern problems to throw at a man who’s a combination of Gary Cooper in High Noon, the aggregate Bush family at their most daffily out-of-touch, and SNL‘s Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. He physically recoils in conversation with new parents who graphically overshare their troubles with breastfeeding; he goes slack-jawed in disbelief at craft beer that purports to “tell a story”; and looking for a restroom in a trendy restaurant, he asks his wife, Peggy, “Are we ‘all gender’”?

Hank, whose absence from society with Peggy is attributed, in a stroke of narrative genius, to an overseas stint servicing propane tanks for Saudi Arabia’s national petroleum firm, hasn’t changed; the world has. And just as the writers of the series conjured his fish-out-of-water story, they conveyed what time has done to the Texas they left behind.

The signal example, and the one that skirts most dangerously the dull polemic that has killed so much post-2016 satire, comes in the third episode, in which Hank, Peggy, and neighborhood buddy Dale Gribble visit the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas. Dale is a quintessential creation of the 1990s, a dubiously employed insect exterminator who, in the original run, collects guns, runs a pirate radio station, and espouses a series of X-Files-esque conspiracy theories.

When the series debuted in 1997, Dale was a barely tolerated local eccentric. In 2025, he, not Hank, is the everyman. During a role-playing exercise at the presidential library, he seizes the initiative from the Bush-worshiping Hank, with the anonymous everyday Texans in their tour group backing Dale, spinning a tale about how, during the Great Recession, “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the same person,” to the hilt. “They weren’t people, they were banking institutions,” Hank protests. “Not according to Newsmax,” one beef-slab yokel retorts.

But the scene barely proceeds any further. Ringleader Dale abruptly leads his friends away in a procession to dinner, and the epistemological gulf is instantly forgotten. King of the Hill‘s always-relaxed tone takes on a new, almost revolutionary dimension when applied to our modern cultural breaches: You might think that soccer is too fruity, or that Obama was born in Kenya, but the brisket is on.

Judge’s talent for observation has always served as a reminder of how overrated its helpmate, conclusion, is. Beavis and Butt-Head hardly had a narrative to speak of; feature films Office Space and Idiocracy, panned as overly baggy in their own time, eventually earned the status of cult classics with their prescient social satire; HBO series Silicon Valley somehow made it a pleasure to hang out with some of the worst people you could possibly imagine.

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It’s that lack of urgency that makes King of the Hill‘s charm better than ever, nearly three decades after its premiere. The show, like so much of Judge’s work, simply moves at the steady, grinding, uneventful pace of life, despite the increasing lunacy of its situational antics. That’s what allows jokes about Hank’s son Bobby getting “canceled” for being a white man operating a Japanese restaurant, or an extended bit about neighbor Bill befriending the staff of a black barbershop, to roll off the viewer’s back like rain, regardless of their ideological perspective. Life, as defined by one’s relationships with those around them, their parents, lovers, financial backers, neighbors, and used car dealers, does not, ultimately, take place in the thunderdome of the attention economy, except for the most damned and wan among us.

So as decrepit as the world of 2025 might seem, the closely-knit lives of the Hills and their neighbors aren’t despoiled, but almost enhanced by it. Like any good 20th-century sitcom, the King of the Hill revival shows how love and good humor trump the petty conflicts imposed on us by civilization. Hank’s stoic, tight-assed ideal of Texan masculinity has endured five presidents, Obergefell, and the rise of K-pop. The rest of us, with our own sui generis cultural fantasies and preferences, should be so lucky.

Derek Robertson is a writer in Brooklyn.