Greg Daniels Shares Why It Was Important for Peggy Hill to Be a ‘Texan’ Woman, Not a ‘Southern’ Woman
Peggy Hill isn’t a Southern belle.Ahead of King of the Hill’s Season 14 premiere, co-creator Greg Daniels opened up about the inspiration behind Arlen’s least fluent Spanish instructor, stating that despite moving to the South after growing up in Montana, Peggy is a Texan woman, not a Southern one. To non-Texans, these terms may seem interchangeable. To King of the Hill’s team, however, the distinction between the two labels is as different as grilling with charcoal versus propane. Peggy, per Daniels, has “more of a frontier, Western spirit than a Southern spirit,” at least at the time of the show’s development, an aura he said was best exemplified by one of his former flames who hailed from the Lone Star State. “When we were first writing King of the Hill, we were talking about Peggy. It seemed very important that she was a Texan woman and not a Southern woman. There seemed to be a big difference, to me, as someone who had a girlfriend from Texas in the mid-1980s,” Daniels told Texas Monthly. But Daniels admits the concept of being a “Real Texan” — a marker that proved meaningful to Hank throughout the show’s original run — is difficult to pin down. “Texas is obviously a place and a bunch of people, but it’s a point of view also,” he explained, describing the locale as “the opposite of California, in a way.” “California represents something to people, and I think people are drawn to California for a certain set of values,” he continued. “And people are drawn to Texas for a set of certain values. So I feel like you can choose to be a Texan.”Of course, it’s possible to overthink the whole thing, and King of the Hill co-creator Mike Judge admits that it probably isn’t that serious. Or as he put it, “I don’t know that Texans sit around and think about themselves as Texans.”
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