King of the Hill creators Greg Daniels and Mike Judge have teamed up to form an animation company called Bandera. And while they’re not ready to share official details, the return of their signature show is one of the animated series that they’re developing.
King of the Hill ran for nearly 260 episodes, from 1997 to 2010. It centered around a working class family in Texas, who may be stereotyped as “hillbillies” or “rednecks,” but who challenge these prejudices. The main characters were Hank, Peggy, Bobby and Luanne, as well as Hank’s best friends Bill, Dale and Boomhauer.
Judge, who is also known for Beavis and Butt-Head and Daniels (who was a writer on The Simpsons), are developing many different series, including Bad Crimes, “an adult animation dark comedy procedural.”
“We were very excited to go into different tones and different styles and try to expand the animation art form,” Daniels told The Hollywood Reporter. “We’re in a golden age for content, right? That’s animation, too. That was one of the things we were talking about in founding the company: ‘Let’s push animation into all these different genres.’”
Other shows in various stages of development at the company are from a who’s who of comedians and artists including Sacha Baron Cohen doing a “very funny children’s show,” Zach Woods, Jimmy O. Yang, tattoo/graffiti artist Mr. Cartoon (“We want to bring his style into animation,” says Judge) and Dykes to Watch Out For with Carrie Brownstein. Several others, including a show Daniels describes as “if Breaking Bad was a half-hour comedy,” are in the works.
Daniels says; “Mostly what Bandera is doing is trying to get us in more of a supervisory role; that’s what we’ve been really concentrating on – using our taste and the people we’ve worked with and trying to help other people achieve their visions.”
Judge says; “There’s one show that I might be a co-creator of, but the rest, it’s mentoring other people, getting people together and being a studio in that regard.”
The promise of more King of the Hill will bring much excitement to the show’s many fans and we appear to be in a golden age of adult animation, with recent hits such as BoJack Horseman and Big Mouth – both of which made our list of the best animated series.