There's No Problem With Peggy Hill, Screen Rant. Peggy Hill Has a Problem With You.

There's been this fear in the back of my mind ever since the makers of the FOX animated comedy King of the Hill announced they were looking to do a reboot. The fear is that someone with the power to bring the beloved Texas sitcom back to life might do something to change the characters and alter the personalities and mannerisms that make them so funny, endearing and memorable.

We get it. Texas may as well be located on the other side of the ocean to some people in the U.S. who don't understand how things really are over here. We're not all trucker hat-wearing, gun rack-hanging, tobacco-spitting, Ted Cruz-votin' hill folk. We're just like any other red-blooded American family types, even if we have to apologize constantly for Cruz.

It turns out it was not an unfounded fear that someone might call for a change for one of the King of the Hill's characters because they might offend someone's sensibilities or cause a misunderstanding. Mainstream media in general will always need to work on its inclusiveness, but Peggy Hill, voiced by Kathy Najimy, is not one of those characters.

The Valnet entertainment website Screen Rant posted an editorial titled, "King of the Hill Revival Needs to Fix Peggy's 'Bad Mom' Problem."

They called Peggy Hill a bad mom? No one disses Peggy Hill. It's on, now! Ho-yeah!

The column penned by writer Melissa Horacek went viral in the span of a couple of days for reasons you probably expect if you know anything about the show or its iconic matriarch. To be fair, Horacek describes Peggy as "a woman with gusto for her accomplishments" but then she lowers the boom right on Peggy's brunette bouffant. She describes Peggy as someone with a "penchant for self-serving behavior" and "narcissism" to "further her own agenda come at the expense of strangers, coworkers, friends and her family." 

The article cites two examples of Peggy's behavior. The first comes from the Season 6 episode "Lupe's Revenge," in which Peggy gets her son Bobby, voiced by Pamela Adlon from the brilliant FX sitcom Better Things, to read prepared lines about a Spanish class trip that will impress a school superintendent. The other comes from the Season 3 episode "Peggy's Pageant Fever," a classic Peggy episode in which she enters the Heimlich County Beauty Pageant and replaces her niece and aspiring beautician Luanne, voiced by the late Brittany Murphy, with a professional stylist.

For starters, Peggy's more than just a hilarious and endearing character to people in and outside of Texas. She's an icon. She one of the greatest and most multi-dimensional women in animated TV history, which itself is an accomplished for a two-dimensional animation.

Peggy has drives and goals just like any other person whose flesh isn't drawn from the tip of alcohol marker, but to diagnose these as narcissism is more than just a little harsh. Characters in comedies can't just start from the tail end of their growth. Their mistakes would be unidentifiable, and Peggy is a character whose growth can be seen over the course of the entire series.

Peggy's strengths far outweigh her earlier weaknesses and mistakes. She's an aspiring educator with a love for learning and helping others learn — even if she don't always get the outcomes she intends. It wouldn't be a comedy if things never went wrong.

That growth isn't just seen in Peggy's actions. The best examples of her worthiness as a mother are shown by how the people around her grow from Peggy's inspiration and love. We only need one example as proof because it can help all of us see ourselves with more kindness.

During the fourth season, Peggy gets mixed up with a foot fetish photographer who turns her larger than average feet into a pornographic website while she thinks her feet are being filmed for their natural beauty. Through the course of the episode, she learns the truth about the crush films she's making and she suffers a tearful breakdown. Her son Bobby lifts her out of her sadness with a beautiful speech about his own perception issues.
"Mom, I'm fat, but big deal," Bobby says to his mom. "I don't feel bad about it. You never made me feel bad about it, and just because there are some people in the world who want me to feel bad about it, doesn't mean I have to. So Bobby Hill's fat. Eh. He's also funny, he's nice, he's got a lot of friends, a girlfriend and, if you don't mind, I think I'll go outside right now and squirt her with water. What are you gonna do?"

Bobby sees a level of acceptance for himself that most people never find in their lifetime. A parent whose child can learn to accept themselves for who they are instead of what other people want them to be at any age must be a pretty damn good one.