Here’s an epiphany I had while driving: I love Landman because it’s basically King of the Hill.
Stay with me.
On the surface, Taylor Sheridan’s oil patch drama and Mike Judge’s animated Texas satire couldn’t look more different. One is prestige cable testosterone with pins, trucks, scantily-clad women, helicopters, and billion-dollar leases. The other is propane, lawn chairs, beer and animated suburbia. Did I mention propane?
But strip away the tone and the budget, and the DNA is startlingly similar.
Both shows are about men who believe in work.
Not hustle culture. Not Silicon Valley disruption. Work. The kind you wake up early for. The kind that gets on your boots. The kind that defines you.
Hank Hill sells propane and propane accessories. Tommy Norris navigates oil leases, land rights, and extraction politics. Different industries. Same archetype: the middle manager of American capitalism trying to keep the machine running.
Both characters exist inside systems that are changing faster than they are comfortable with. Hank lived through the slow erosion of small-town stability. Tommy operates in a version of Texas where oil is both lifeblood and lightning rod. In both cases, the world around them feels more volatile than the values they were raised on.
And here’s the kicker.
Both leads have a best friend named Dale.
That cannot be accidental in the cosmic sense of storytelling.
On King of the Hill, Dale Gribble is paranoid, conspiratorial, slightly unhinged, and yet weirdly loyal. He represents the fringe energy orbiting Hank’s grounded pragmatism.
In Landman, the dynamic isn’t an animated satire; the presence of a Dale in the emotional ecosystem serves a similar purpose: a counterweight. A reminder that even in serious dramas, every steady man is surrounded by volatility.
Coincidence? Probably.
But it feels spiritually correct.
Landman isn’t ironic. It isn’t coastal. It doesn’t wink at the audience. It presents oil culture as lived reality, not as a thesis statement. The characters are flawed, but they are not punchlines. Their pride in work is not mocked.
That was King of the Hill’s secret, too.
For all its satire, the show never treated Hank as stupid. It treated him as principled. He believed in responsibility, community, and competence. The joke was often the absurdity of modernity colliding with that worldview, not the worldview itself.
Landman drains the comedy (there are very funny moments) and raises the stakes, but the emotional engine is similar. It’s about dignity. It’s about loyalty. It’s about navigating institutions that feel increasingly unstable.
In a television landscape dominated by antiheroes, dystopias, and algorithm-chasing genre mashups, Landman feels almost old-fashioned. It believes in geography. It believes in place. It believes in industry. It believes that what a man does for a living shapes how he sees the world.
That’s deeply American storytelling.
Hank Hill once said, “I sell propane and propane accessories.” It was both a joke and a declaration of identity. Tommy Norris might as well say, “I sell oil and oil leases.” It’s not funny. It’s survival.
One show did it with animated deadpan and backyard barbecues.
The other does it with helicopters and billion-dollar contracts.
But at their core, both are about the same thing:
Work as identity. Pride as currency. Texas as a metaphor.
And apparently, a best friend named Dale.
Maybe we don’t just love Landman because it’s slick or politically provocative.
Maybe we love it because, somewhere deep down, it feels like coming home to Arlen, just with higher stakes and fewer propane jokes.
Both seasons of Landman are streaming on Paramount+. All seasons of King of the Hill are streaming on Disney+.
The Geek is a working screenwriter, director and screenwriting instructor.
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