King Of The Hill Boss Defends The Choice To Explore Bobby's Sex Life (!) — Plus, Grade The Revival!

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Monday's King of the Hill premiere on Hulu.

King of the Hill is back, and Bobby Hill is all grown up... in more ways than we expected.

Hulu's revival of the classic Fox animated comedy premiered on Monday with an episode that caught up with Hank Hill years later, and his son Bobby is now 21 years old and working as a chef at a Japanese restaurant. Bobby hit it off with a girl at his restaurant and later caught up with her at a frat party, before the girl invited him back to her room to make out. Bobby's mom Peggy woke up later that night when she got a call from Bobby — but it turns out he just butt-dialed her while he was mid-hookup, and all Peggy could hear was him, um, grunting. ("Are you eating something?")

For fans accustomed to seeing Bobby as a 13-year-old smart-aleck, it was quite a jolt to see him exploring things sexually — and that was the intended reaction, showrunner Saladin Patterson tells TVLine.

"We went back and forth about how much we wanted to push the envelope in that first episode," he admits, but he and co-creators Mike Judge and Greg Daniels "all have kids who are in their 20s... and I think that's a common parenting experience. We're not ready to see our own kids in adult situations, right? Because in our minds, we like to keep them as kids. But time moves on, and a part of our own personal growth is starting to accept that they, too have grown."

Accepting Bobby Hill as a sexually active adult is just the kind of awkward but realistic thing King of the Hill has always addressed, he adds: "King of the Hill, if it's never been anything else, it's always been a good example of grounded, real-life interactions with people and characters, right? So we wanted to take the audience on that journey that Hank himself is going through." And part of that journey for Peggy is denial, Patterson points out: "In her mind, she creates a whole other situation going on because she can't really wrap her head around what it could be."

In the end, Patterson and the King of the Hill writers hope that viewers find updates like Bobby's adulthood "relatable and hopefully refreshing, especially when they realize that the same Bobby they've always loved is still there, inside of a 21-year-old."

Have you watched Hulu's King of the Hill revival yet? Give it a grade in our poll, and let us know what you think in a comment below.