Mike Judge’s King Of The Hill, the animated adventures of a Texas propane salesman and his family, has been absent from the airwaves for six years, which is a shame, since the show’s even-handed, bipartisan humor is precisely the kind America needs in this bitter, deeply divided age of red state/blue state politics. That’s the assessment of writer Bert Clere in an appreciative essay about the show at The Atlantic. Before discussing the importance of the Fox series, Clere briefly summarizes the current state of the television union: Liberals watch quirky comedies, conservatives watch reality and crime shows, and there is little to no overlap between the two. What made King Of The Hill different, Clere writes, is that it poked fun at both liberals and conservatives in ways that everyone in the audience could enjoy. Protagonist Hank Hill and his beer-drinking “redneck” buddies were not the height of sophistication, but the show also scored some laughs at the expense of the liberal bureaucrats and New Age space cadets who regularly invaded their world.