'King of the Hill' writers dig for ideas deep in heart of Texas

AUSTIN, Texas — On the Monday morning after the Emmy Awards show in September, while much of the TV industry was sleeping off a night of self-celebration and repeated acts of valet parking, 12 comedy writers from the animated Fox series "King of the Hill" met in the American Airlines terminal at Los Angeles International Airport.

By 8 a.m. they were at their gate, sprawled out. Seen as a subspecies, TV comedy writers look the part — white guys, or mostly white guys, in their late 20s and 30s, with jobs that don't require them to tuck in their shirts.

These writers were headed to Austin, where for the next two days they would interview people about floods, child beauty pageants and propane. "King of the Hill," whose seventh season on Fox begins tonight, takes place in the made-up town of Arlen, Texas, where Hank Hill sells propane and propane accessories ("with dignity"). Hank's loves, in no discernible order, are his backyard grill; his headstrong wife, Peggy; his surprisingly deep, fruit-pie-eating son, Bobby; and the art of standing in front of a fence, drinking beer out of a can.

In this last pursuit, Hank is typically joined by his three friends: Bill, a divorced loner, sad and wide-eyed; Boomhauer, who speaks in twangy, vaguely comprehensible sentences; and Dale, an anti-government enthusiast who sounds like a cross between William S. Burroughs and a farmer on hooch. It is in front of the fence, from Hank to Dale, that the show finds its political voice, in various shades of Texas drawl. "The schools teach reading, writing and arithmetic, but they don't teach the subjects that will really matter after the coming apocalypse. Namely, etiquette and social dancing," is something Dale says.

In what has become something of a yearly tradition, the writers dream up story lines for these characters in Los Angeles, then head to Austin for a research trip. It all sounds a little like an African safari, wherein a bunch of Hollywood guys drop in on Texas to watch the locals in their native habitat. Except these writers go for the verisimilitude. And the barbecue.

This year, in addition to touring a megachurch and Action Propane in Leander, the writers met with a panel from the American Red Cross to talk flood relief (it was time, they thought, for Arlen to be visited by a flood). Each writer was given $150 in cash and a suck-up pad — show-speak for the note pads they were supposed to use when interviewing people.

The suck-up part is a facetious reference to executive producer Greg Daniels. Daniels was the last one to show up at the gate. He was wearing cowboy boots. Daniels, who is more than 6 feet tall and looks a little like a policy wonk, grew up in Manhattan and went to Harvard; there, he became a member of the Harvard Lampoon, the school's humor society and progenitor of countless TV comedy writers. Daniels, 39, is no exception; his credits include "Saturday Night Live," "Not Necessarily the News" — and the show that became the Lampoon West, "The Simpsons."

When Daniels signed up to develop "King of the Hill," he made a pilgrimage to Austin to visit Mike Judge. The creator and voices behind the wildly popular MTV cartoon "Beavis and Butt-head," Judge, who has an innate sense of people and their quirks, had pitched "King of the Hill" to Fox based on a treatment and some drawings. Now Judge voices Hank and Boomhauer. "He showed me some of the places where he thought Hank lived," Daniels said of that initial trip to Austin to visit Judge. "I found it to be very useful."

It was Daniels who had the writers read "The Death of Common Sense" to get inside the heart and mind of Hank Hill. The book, written by Georgetown law professor Philip K. Howard and a best seller in the mid-'90s, argued that a regulatory-happy government was crowding out good old-fashioned common sense with laws that inspired lunacy. This, with his beer and his friends and his otherwise unperturbed freedom, is the thinking of Hank Hill.

In their subsequent trips to Austin, the writers have come to know their characters still better. One year they were thrown out of a gun show, but that only taught them to identify themselves to locals on a need-to-know basis. Like their show, they are not here to mock hillbillies, they are here to gather data — the details and anecdotes that give "King of the Hill" that rare commodity on TV: a sense of an actual world.

Their first night in town, the writers delved into the ribs at the Ironworks Barbeque and afterward worked off the meal at Red's Indoor Shooting Range, out in nearby Pflugerville. Red's offers a frequent-shooter card for $119.95, but the writers just picked out some handguns and rented several lanes for an hour.

There was a mother and daughter over in Lane 1 — Sally Joe Frame of Round Rock and her 13-year-old daughter, Amy Sue. "The NRA is really pushing youth hunts," Frame told Kit Boss, one of the writers (and a former Seattle Times reporter). He jotted this down in his suck-up pad.

If shooting a gun for the first time is a kind of bar mitzvah in Texas, "King of the Hill" has already addressed this. In one episode, Bobby asks Hank to take him hunting for the first time. Hank is embarrassed — not because he disapproves of firearms, but because he's a bad shot and will screw up a key bonding ritual with his son.

In the end, Hank lets Bobby drive his truck and they proceed to run over a deer. It is a measure of how marginally understood "King of the Hill" is when you consider the TV Guide synopsis of that episode: "Hank teaches Bobby to drive."

While "The Simpsons" is a consistent achievement in zany plots and heavily referential joke writing, "King of the Hill" is character-driven and deceptively slow. Thanks to syndication, the show airs 11 times a week on Fox, and in prime time the series returns this year to Sunday nights behind "The Simpsons," where it enjoyed its best two seasons in the late '90s, averaging more than 15 million viewers.

In Austin, the writers split up and fanned out. They had their suck-up pads. "We Buy Ugly Houses," a billboard proclaimed.

Daniels looked up and thought of a story line: Hank and Peggy Hill swell with pride when a real-estate agent calls wanting to purchase their home, only to discover that she's from the "We Buy Ugly Houses" agency.

Already, the day had been fruitful.