Variety is reporting that the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim has acquired the off-net rights to the King of the Hill cartoon series.  Adult Swim will begin cablecasting Mike Judge’s Emmy Award-winning cartoon series that finds its humor in character studies set in a realistic environment in January 2009.  The agreement with Twentieth Century Fox TV gives Adult Swim rights to all 13 seasons of King of the Hill—a total of 239 episodes.

According to Variety, King of the Hill will kick off the Adult Swim block an hour earlier at 10pm (ET, PT) and will be followed by reruns of Seth MacFarlane’s popular Family Guy, which has long been a staple of the Adult Swim block, which remains one of the most popular late night destinations (on network or cable) for the hard to reach 18-34 male demographic.  The acquisition of King of the Hill and its teaming with Family Guy restores Adult Swim’s opening 1-2 punch, which hasn’t quite been the same since Futurama departed for Comedy Central at the beginning of 2008.

Fox recently cancelled King of the Hill, but creators Mike Judge and Greg Daniels are in talks with ABC to continue the series for a 14th season (see “King of the Hill to New Network?”).