A random thought about "King of the Hill"
I am fooooo' real!
You could look at Hank Hill being a propane salesman as an interesting case in ideological formation: Propane dreams.
Upton Sinclair had a famous quote where he said no man can understand something if his paycheck depends on him not understanding it.
I don’t know how Hank Hill got into the propane game, but he didn’t come at it from a place of love. If it came out of necessity, over time, he would have had to convince himself that propane was ideal for cooking meats, even though in his Texas heart, he knows coals are the superior form of grilling.
So Hank is literally lobotomizing himself to reduce the cognitive dissonance of alienating his labor on behalf of an inferior meat grilling method, that he is a sham. All of his masculine virtue signaling is a hollow, pathetic attempt to reclaim agency over a life that essentially amounts to serfdom on the properties of Mr. Strickland.
I'm really not so sure about the sham part, if I'm honest. Grilling with charcoal is not the same.
I came to a lot of the same conclusions when I wrote about the show in my book "America 'Toons In", but you did it with less words.