Peggy Hill

Margaret J. "Peggy" Hill (née Platter) is a fictional character in the American animated series King of the Hill.

Biography

Peggy is the matriarch of the Hill family and the wife of series protagonist Hank Hill, mother to Robert Jeffrey "Bobby" Hill, and aunt to Luanne Platter. Peggy was born in Montana to cattle ranchers in 1959, later moving to Texas. Her immediate family includes Doc Platter (father),^[1] Maddy Platter (mother), Luanne Platter (niece), Hoyt Platter (brother), Laverne Platter (aunt), Boffo Platter (uncle), Hank Hill (husband), Bobby Hill (son), Elroy "Lucky" Kleinschmidt (nephew-in-law), and Gracie Margaret Kleinschmidt (grand-niece).^[2] Other relatives, including her brother, mother, and father, are featured in the series at various times. She moved to Texas as a young woman (presumably before or during high school because of an episode where she and Hank were dating in high school), where she met Hank Hill.

Character

She wears glasses and is generally seen wearing sleeveless blouses and culottes. Although she is of relatively normal height for a woman, she has abnormally large feet – she wears a size 16½ shoe on her left foot, and a size 16 on her right (although in true US shoe sizing, there are no half sizes after size 12). Her feet are the one trait she is deeply insecure about, despite the fact that it's been said that such feet give her her exceptional athletic ability. She is gifted at softball, among other sports. She is also skilled at playing Boggle, and once won the Texas State Boggle Championship.

Within the household, Peggy provides a voice of reason to and a buffer between Hank and Bobby, who have difficulty relating to each other. Peggy has taken Hank to task about their relationship, or the lack thereof. Peggy's devotion to family extends to her niece Luanne, whom she thinks of as a daughter. Peggy freely encourages Bobby and Luanne; sometimes to Hank's distress. Peggy's high opinion of herself is often quite an annoyance to her family and friends. She usually considers herself smarter than everyone she meets and knows; more attractive than Luanne, Nancy and many other more conventionally attractive women; and constantly takes credit for things she has never done. Hank finally confronts her about her confidence issues in "Peggy's Fan Fair". Despite boasting of her intelligence, she has been a victim of manipulation multiple times, such as being conned out of $2,500 for a phony degree in the episode "The Substitute Spanish Prisoner". She was easily indoctrinated into a homogenous cult despite her intent of trying to remove Luanne from the very same group. She has been conned into participating in two separate pyramid schemes, one selling Herbalife-inspired health food products, the other selling kitchen utensils.

She believes that people can do anything if they commit themselves. This often gets her into trouble, as she takes the philosophy too literally. Peggy often plunges into things, disregarding her own complete lack of skill; for example, during the episode "Phish and Wildlife," she walks onto a crime scene expecting to become part of the investigation just because she is "on a roll."^[3] Her inability to understand the potential consequences of her actions has led to the harm of those around her. For example, in the episode "Lady and Gentrification," when Peggy begins selling working-class housing to upper-middle-class Millennial hipsters in Enrique's primarily Mexican neighborhood, property values skyrocket and Enrique nearly loses his house due to the massive increase in his rent. To solve the problem, Peggy makes it appear as if typical middle-class families were moving in, prompting the hipsters to leave.

Peggy assumes that everyone else thinks as highly of her as she herself does. Upon meeting Eduardo Felipe, star of the fictional Monsignor Martinez, she believes he wants to have an affair with her.^[4] This is partially based on a cultural misunderstanding; over wine, he says his wife is "with the ancestors" (it is later revealed he meant she was visiting her grandparents) and enjoys a platonic evening with Peggy, who is convinced he feels otherwise - however, the situation is largely based on Peggy's presumption that she is irresistible. Peggy believes she is far more conventionally attractive than she is, from believing she could win a beauty contest hands down, to thinking herself on par with Bobby's girlfriend.^[5][6] Comically, each time she says something to this effect, Hank makes a befuddled expression. Peggy is a writer also. She has written for the Arlen Bystander for a while. She has written musings and often speaks like a muser. Always speaking in a formal, lyrical and stilted sort of cleverness. Like a philosophy major or perhaps a fortune-cookie. The writers always try to even speak eloquently to show how clever they are.

As another running gag, Peggy often calls attention to her part in something for its own sake. She often states well-known facts and claims them as her original thoughts, like suggesting that "the day after Thanksgiving is, in my opinion, the biggest shopping day of the year."^[7] In line with this, she uses "As I like to say/call it," alongside common expressions such as referring to leverage as a function to which only she specifically refers. Peggy occasionally makes claims that seem to have no basis in reality at all, such as "Swiss cheese is not Mexican, it's American." This is also portrayed when talking about people; for example, when she saw there was no organ donor sticker on a man's driver license, she stated she believed he was an alcoholic. She also believed Minh had an unhappy marriage because she enjoyed growing roses. When she is particularly pleased with her own cleverness, she raises her hand to her chest and chuckles, "Oh, Peggy!"

Peggy prides herself as a cook, although others consider her cooking to be average. Her family dinners are a regular rotation of a few menu items which include Frito pie with Wolf Brand Chili on Mondays, fried pork chops on Tuesdays and on Wednesdays "Spa-Peggy" and meatballs,^[8] the one dish which, according to Hank, "she's kind of made her own" though it is simply spaghetti with meatballs with "just the right amount of sugar and grated parmigiana cheese."^[9] She is also proud of her Apple Brown Betty to which she adds a spoonful of orange juice.^[10] Other dishes mentioned are beef chop suey,^[11] chicken and broccoli which is made with "plenty of cheese",^[12] "arroz con chicken"^[13] and tacos.^[14] Peggy becomes very defensive when others challenge her cooking abilities, having been in cooking rivalries with Minh and her son Bobby. In the Season 8 episode "Goodbye Normal Jeans" when Hank begins to prefer Bobby's cooking over her own, Peggy shows that she is not above sabotaging even her own son to restore her ego. In the same episode she is also shown as jealous of Bobby after she ruined Hank's jeans in the wash and Bobby made him a new pair with skills he had learned at school in Home Ec, claiming that her sewing machine could not make seams as straight as Bobby had achieved.

As the series progresses, it puts increasing emphasis on Peggy's superiority complex. As her egotism grows to extremes, other characters become more aware of it. Other characters seem to tolerate Peggy's behavior. In a season eight episode, Peggy states she was once a cheerleader. Bobby says he thought it was more of her "big talk," acknowledging her tendency to self-aggrandize. (Peggy never actually was a cheerleader.) ^[15] Hank truly loves Peggy and indeed tolerates her ego on numerous occasions, but at one point, he has enough of Peggy's ego and directly confronts Peggy after she attacks Randy Travis in public, claiming he stole a song she wrote. The irony in this is that Randy Travis did indeed steal the song, but not even Hank believed her due to her egotism.^[16] In the season 4 episode "Bill of Sales", she puts her own ego in check when she has a moral crisis after blatantly manipulating Bill to exploit his natural talent for sales. Peggy's overly high self-esteem may be a reaction to her mother's constant criticism.

Character flaws aside, Peggy is a kind person at heart who often works from the best motives. Peggy is completely devoted to her husband and family. She refers to Hank as the love of her life. Peggy has demonstrated her love for and protectiveness of Hank several times. For example, in the episode "What Happens at the National Propane Gas Convention in Memphis Stays at the National Propane Gas Convention in Memphis" she stood up to Buck Strickland on her husband's behalf when his antics drove Hank to get drunk and make a scene in public at a trade show. Peggy confronted Buck and told him very bluntly that Buck owed his successful business to Hank and demanded that Buck help her fix the mess that he got Hank into as a result of his behavior.

However, Peggy makes no secret of her contempt for her father-in-law, Cotton Hill, particularly because of his neglectful, cruel behavior toward Hank. Indeed, her hatred of Cotton is such that she accepts his offer to literally dance on his grave. This hatred between the two even continues when Cotton is on his deathbed. While Hank is out of room, Peggy tells Cotton exactly what she thinks of him just before he dies. When Hank returns, she lies and says Cotton said kind things about Hank before his passing.

Family

Peggy has a strained relationship with her parents. Her mother is emotionally cold towards her and her father constantly speaks in riddles. These portrayals of her parents, from the episode "A Rover Runs Through It", are actually a retconned version noticeably different from the homemaker mother – and presumably equally suburban father – displayed in flashbacks in the earlier episodes "I Remember Mono" and "Transnational Amusements Presents: Peggy's Magic Sex Feet". Early on in the series, Mrs. Platter is seen visiting the Hills' home, implying that she lives in or near Arlen, Texas, and is on speaking terms with her daughter, although the episode "Happy Hank's Giving", in which Mrs. Platter appears in her original incarnation, implies that her mother either still lives in Montana or has moved back there. This persona is retconned by "A Rover Runs Through It". The suggestion in the later episode is that Peggy left her parents behind when she went to Texas, which is a significant alteration to the previously stated timeline. In both incarnations, Mrs. Platter tends to be critical, unappreciative, and dismissive of her daughter as a whole (albeit for different reasons).

Peggy thinks of Luanne as a surrogate daughter and does her best to give her guidance and encourage her; always wanting the best for her. With this in mind, Peggy is openly critical of Luanne's choice to get involved with Lucky, who Peggy views as not being good enough for Luanne. At first, Peggy sabotages Lucky's efforts to better himself by getting a GED. But, in the end, Peggy accepted the relationship, realizing that Lucky made Luanne happy. Peggy is very protective of Luanne, and has defended her niece from Luanne's abusive and alcoholic mother, Leanne.

Peggy also has a brother named Hoyt who is Luanne's father. Peggy lied to Luanne by telling her that Hoyt working on an oil rig when he was actually in prison. When Hoyt returned to Arlen, Peggy tried to help him out and gave him money, but eventually realized Hoyt was an incorrigible criminal and would destroy the entire family. Hank then tricked Hoyt into committing an obvious crime and convinced him to confess to it along with an earlier robbery. This would send him to prison for life, but maintain Luanne's false impression of her father as a good and hard-working man. Peggy and Hank then told Luanne that Hoyt had accepted "a lifetime contract" to work on an oil rig.

Relationship with Hank

In addition to discrepancies regarding Peggy's family, the show is inconsistent with the timeline of Peggy and Hank's relationship. While "I Remember Mono" portrays the couple as high school sweethearts, other episodes directly contradict this.

In "Luanne Virgin 2.0" Peggy reveals that she lost her virginity to a friend who was trying to decide if he was gay. She later added that she had not yet met Hank when this occurred.

In the series' second episode ("Square Peg") Peggy reveals to Luanne that she did not kiss a boy until she was 20. However, this is seemingly at odds with the later revelation (from the second season episode "I Remember Mono") that Peggy and Hank met and began dating just prior to their senior year of high school, with Valentine's Day falling near the six-month mark in their relationship. Peggy also mentioned that the boy she kissed was dead by the time the episode took place.

Jobs

At the start of the series, Peggy works as a substitute teacher at Arlen High School and Tom Landry Middle School. She typically teaches Spanish, although she is not particularly fluent. Peggy often remarks she won the "Substitute Teacher Of The Year" three years in a row. But the third year, she claimed an award that was really for Hank. Peggy herself actually founded the award itself so she could win it.

In the third season, she begins writing a column for a local newspaper, the Arlen Bystander, and is still seen sub-editing from time to time. In one episode, she desperately wants to teach on a full-time basis and as such, she poses as a nun in order to get a full-time teaching job at a Catholic school, which led to severe clashes within herself that a Methodist woman may be corrupting Catholic students. In another episode, her teaching skills land her a role as the private tutor of the children for the actor who plays Monsignor Martinez. She loses this job after she assumes that her employer is romantically interested in her. This is, in part, due to cultural misunderstanding and Peggy's own over-inflated opinion of her beauty. In season 11, after writing a negative article about a local real-estate agent, she is fired from the newspaper but then hired by the real-estate agent where she then works for the remainder of the series. In her job as a real estate agent, she is moderately successful at selling real estate and is willing to go to outrageous lengths to make a sale, including over-zealous self-promotion on her part.

For a brief time, she became the chief proprietor of Sugarfoot's barbecue restaurant after Buck Strickland signed over the deed to Hank in order to hide his assets from a pending divorce. Hank took Buck's advice that Sugarfoot's was a turnkey operation and decided to let the place run itself, but Peggy pointed out that under Texas law she was entitled to half of Hank's property and took a more involved role in the restaurant. Peggy made numerous changes which were very unpopular with the people of Arlen, such as installing carpeting, serving meals on plates instead of butcher paper, and not allowing for substitutions in meals, which she emphasizes with a model train and a large likeness of herself which wags its finger (despite the fact that she is a substitute teacher). True to Peggy's self-importance, she renamed the place Peggy's Sugarfoot's, which ironically saved Buck's marriage as his wife was horrified by the new changes.

See also

• Hank Hill
• Bobby Hill
• List of King of the Hill characters

Notes

References

External links

• King of the Hill at the Internet Movie Database