Oh god, I fucking hated that episode. Hank not being able to haggle a price like that goes completely against his Boomer persona. Not to mention his irrational hatred for convertibles just seems weird, like, I didn't know they were supposed to be a gay stereotype or anything, and besides his fucking wife [a fucking woman] was the one driving the car, so who cares if a convertible is effeminate. Then the part that always makes me cringe is when Hank unknowingly teams up with those anarchists to set fire to the car dealership, and despite it being a huge disaster, no one seems to take it seriously in Arlen. The cops just kind of launch a half-assed investigation like a minor offense, when it was a catastrophic disaster which resulted in millions in loss...definitely a national headline for sure. Like, those guys blew up a fucking car dealership with improvised explosives and the town isn't very moved by it, and Hank didn't even know about it until afterwards. And then the ending pisses me off when Bobby goes to buy a video game console, and Hank teaches him to haggle prices at the store. You can't fucking do that at a store like Best Buy (or whereever the store was supposed to be a parody of).
Yeah, that was one of the episodes from the tail end of the series. IIRC, it was either Season 12 or Season 13.
Both of those seasons are generally considered to be a lot weaker than the seasons before since they were greenlit at the last possible second on a greatly reduced budget.
Several of the episodes in those seasons were using scripts that were rejected in previous years were actually produced into episodes as a way to save time and stay within the budget Fox set for them.
The MySpace episode from the very last season (which initially aired in early 2009, for context) was practically guaranteed to be one of those scripts given the episode's subject matter and the fact that King of the Hill's writers and producers never quite fell into the "How do you do, fellow kids?" rabbit hole that the writers of Zombie Simpsons did.
I honestly think "The Accidental Terrorist" and "Lost In MySpace" were probably first written as scripts for Season 9 or 10 or maybe Season 8 at the earliest. They both really have the feel of the episodes from 2004-2005 both in their subject matter and the general tone of the show at that point, but in a more exaggerated way.
Autistic as this may sound, I do think King of the Hill is one of those shows where you have these distinct eras where they have their own "vibe" to them, but it's more in the overall feeling you get from watching them as opposed to the actual quality of the show (unlike The Simpsons)
Seasons 1-3 have this weird vibe that is realistic but still seems kind of "quirky", a lot like Beavis and Butthead or something you'd see in the early years of Adult Swim. That's probably why the show was picked up by Adult Swim and aired for most of the 2010's, and a lot of the early promo material for King of the Hill on Adult Swim tended to exclusively use clips from the first three seasons.
Seasons 4-7 are more or less the height of the show's success and is where everything is codified but it's also not heavily Flanderized either. Overall, it's a very standout era with Season 6 being the peak of the show in this era.
Seasons 8-11 are sort of like a weird limbo where they're not as good as the first seven seasons but are still very much worthwhile for the most part. This is when Peggy quits being a substitute teacher and starts working for the newspaper and the show got screwed hard by Fox meddling and the NFL contract often delaying the entire Sunday lineup for months with King of the Hill being the most likely to be preempted by football.
Seasons 12 and 13 are generally weaker and overall pretty middling with a few scattered gems in the mix, and is where most of the show's worst episodes generally reside. The episodes from this season that are good tend to stand out as excellent, namely the episode where Luanne gives birth to her baby and the series finale.
