As much as I’ve enjoyed what this season has done so far with Hank and Bobby, “Chore Money, Chore Problems” is a well-timed reminder that the show has other rich character relationships beyond that pairing. Here, father and son are separated into their own A and B plots, and while there are thematic echoes between them, there’s no narrative crossover. Hank’s at home in Arlen battling retirement ennui, in a story that brings in Boomhauer for its setup but is ultimately about Hank and Peggy figuring out the next stage of their lives together. And Bobby is in Dallas trying to reconcile his work and social lives in a story line that reintroduces Connie as a potential love interest but finds its emotional payoff in a trio of childhood friends reuniting as they navigate young adulthood.

In this respect, “Chore Money, Chore Problems” gave me flashes of the season-five classic “I Don’t Want to Wait …,” wherein Bobby, Connie, and a newly tall, mustachioed Joseph dramatically fumble their way into teenagerdom while Hank pursues a new hobby of building coffins for himself and Peggy. The coffin thing is more of a running gag than a story line, but one still rooted in anxiety about getting older and the comfort of having someone by your side as you stare down the next phase of life, whether it’s the person you’ll be buried next to or the friends who accompanied you through the awkwardness of puberty. “Chore Money, Chore Problems” lands on a similarly poignant beat for both generations, even if they each get there via very different story lines.

Or are they that different? At first, there doesn’t seem to be that much connecting Hank’s foray into app-based handyman work and Bobby getting back in touch with Connie, except that they’re both fretting over their smartphones: Hank over the banana rating he’s received on the Taskrabbit-esque Chore Chimp from the couple who hired him to hang a curtain rod — well, technically, they hired Boomhauer, but he got concussed — and Bobby over how to text Connie without sounding like AI or a 60-year-old married meat supplier. (Emilio suggests he emulate those girls on The Summer I Turned Pretty; they use three words max: “Try, ‘Mama, what’s good?’”) Neither is quite sure about the rules of how people communicate these days. This is a pretty familiar place for Hank to be, albeit amplified by the revival’s time jump, but in Bobby’s case it stems less from being out of step with the times and more from the fact that Connie is, well, Connie. 

There’s a lot to unpack there, so let’s start with the more straightforward Hank stuff. As with the Monsignor Martinez reboot in “The Beer Story,” an early-episode glimpse into the Hills’ TV diet helps establish this episode’s themes. Sure, The Makeup Bakeup, a cursed blend of The Great British Bake Off and Naked Attraction, is a comment on the state of modern TV, but it also represents our current era of oversharing as kicked off by reality TV and perpetuated by social media. Hank is naturally mortified even being in the same room with such programming, just as he’s mortified when the couple who hires him as Boomhauer start sharing their new-parent problems: no sleep, no sex, a constantly crying baby, creeping regrets that they even had a kid, much less started a YouTube channel about the experience. It’s the exact kind of conversation Hank doesn’t want to have, and the sort of interaction he probably assumed an app like Chore Chimp would allow him to avoid. But those damn two bananas tell a different story. (Hank doesn’t even like bananas; they’re monkey food!)

The hours Peggy’s spent watching The Makeup Bakeup enable her to diagnose the couple’s problem with Hank: They just want someone to listen to them. Young people these days expect everyone and anyone to be their therapist, whether it’s the single stranger they hired to do a household chore or the dozens of strangers watching their parenting vlogs. That’s why Boomhauer is so highly rated on Chore Chimp: He’s an established great listener and advice-giver, and in today’s attention economy, his ability to make people feel better about getting laid off or dumped is more valuable than Hank’s ability to fix a broken deck board or make a house’s gutters gleam.

But one thing Hank Hill will always do is go the extra mile to achieve customer satisfaction, so he offers to do free work for the couple to make up for the bananas. Given how much enjoyment Hank gets out of doing chores, that’s not really going the extra mile, but forcing himself to share personal information is. So he tells the couple about Peggy’s own struggles getting Baby Bobby to, shudder, “latch on,” which the couple responds to so positively he throws in a bonus anecdote about Peggy’s postpartum UTIs. It gives the couple what they want and gets him what he wants — a perfect rating — but it does so at the expense of his wife’s privacy and dignity.

Of course, one of the great things about Peggy Hill is that she isn’t easily shamed, so while she’s not exactly pleased to learn the couple has passed these stories along to their followers (“Hashtag UTI gang, hashtag Peggy!”), she’s more disappointed that Hank’s inability to open up runs so deep he had to, in the parlance of reality TV, throw her under the bus. The Makeup Bakeup has shown her how important it is for couples to share with each other, regardless of whether they have an audience. Faced with her assessment of his shortcomings, Hank’s first instinct is to even the playing field by sharing his own embarrassing parenting story of when he used a staple gun to fix Bobby’s diaper. But Peggy’s unimpressed response and frustration over his spending more time with Chore Chimp than her brings out the real story: He’s not just bored in retirement, he’s scared he’ll never again feel satisfied unless he’s working. He would never characterize it as such, but this admission is therapeutic for him, as well as for Peggy, who’s similarly unsatisfied with the way she’s been spending her golden years watching hours of that godforsaken reality show. They agree to keep talking and working through it together, in the privacy of their own bedroom.

Like his dad, Bobby also spends this episode dealing with a frustrating couple, one that was hinted at back in the premiere when he bumped into Connie while she was visiting “a friend” at Amber’s college. If you guessed Chane was that friend, well done, because this is not a pairing I saw coming. Even Connie has her doubts, which she expresses to Bobby as she hides in Robata Chane’s kitchen from her date’s stories about frat pranks that all sound like crimes. Given that Bobby has just had his hopes of rekindling things with Connie snuffed out, it would be very understandable for him to try and stoke these doubts. But that’s not our Bobby, who may have inherited his dad’s talent for grilling but clearly got Peggy’s gift for psychoanalysis. Maybe he’s been watching The Makeup Bakeup, too, or maybe it’s just because, being part of the younger generation, he inherently recognizes that Connie is looking for someone to play therapist. Do I believe his assessment that, beneath all the daddy issues and insecurity, Chane is really a good guy? Not really, but it’s what Connie wants to hear, so Bobby obliges because he really is a good guy. And because more than anything, he just wants him and Connie to be friends.

Yeah, Joseph doesn’t believe that one, either. He also can’t believe Bobby still doesn’t know his generation’s rules for texting and doesn’t understand why his roommate would send a text with a period if he wasn’t mad at him. But in a sure sign Bobby and Connie are soul mates, she uses a period when she texts to say it was great to see him and invite him to karaoke. He keeps his expectations low, assuming Chane will be there too, but when he arrives at A Lone Star Is Born to find her rolling solo, ordering shots, and signing them up to duet on their song, it seems reasonable to hope Connie has something else in mind. And she does, but it’s not what Bobby was just beginning to allow himself to imagine: It’s a setup with Connie’s roommate Ola, who is both cool and into Bobby. (“Hey, husky boy, you trying to eat?”) But as we saw with Amber in the premiere, Bobby is fully capable of getting some NSA action if he wants, and it’s not what he wants here. He claims to be too busy with the restaurant to date anyone, which may be true, but his real reason for turning down Ola — very sweetly and respectfully! — is clearly the one standing over by the bar.

And then she’s standing on his balcony. Connie showing up unexpectedly at Bobby and Joseph’s apartment isn’t quite the romantic gesture Bobby thinks it might be when he greets her with a nervous hi-exclamation point. But it also sort of is. She apologizes for ambushing him with Ola, explaining herself using the same reasoning Bobby gave Joseph for why he didn’t slap Connie’s name out of Chane’s mouth: She wants them to be friends. More specifically, she wants them to be able to hang out together, and if it’s just platonically for the time being, well, if it’s good enough for Bobby, it’s good enough for me.

As pleasantly nostalgic as it would be for Bobby and Connie to “go together” again like they did as kids, it’s more satisfying to watch the two of them and Joseph slide so easily back into their old friendship. King of the Hill has always valued long-term romantic partnerships, and this episode highlights a great one with Hank and Peggy’s story. But the show’s also always been a celebration of lifelong friends, be they the buddies you drink with in the alley or the ones you hang out with on the balcony watching your own private reality show. With all due respect to The Makeup Bakeup, I think I’d rather watch Bobby Hill Presents: The Adulterers any day.

Musings

• Speaking of Hank’s friends, those not named Boomhauer only get a brief scene this episode, and it’s not even in the alley! Dale has a “fun fact” about concussions, and Bill wants to eat the frozen-potato compress when Boomhauer’s done with it, so everything appears to be in order here.

• And speaking of Bobby’s friends not named Connie, Joseph is great this episode (his inability to “yes, and” while watching The Adulterers notwithstanding), as is his new voice actor, Tai Leclaire, who fits in so seamlessly with Pamela Adlon and Lauren Tom’s aged-up performances that I had to double-check it was a recasting. Great job, everyone.

• “I just don’t get it, Peggy, those curtain rods were taut and true. I could have done a chin-up on those things.” “Then I bet I could have done two.” Peggy is such a voice of reason throughout this episode, it’s nice to offset that with a bit of her characteristic delusion.

• I’ve been fairly dubious about the menu at Robata Chane up to this point, but sign me up for that miso trout dip.

 Bobby and Connie’s easy chemistry makes it easy to root for them to rekindle their relationship, but we’ll have to settle for friendship for now.