Deep in the heart of Arlen, Texas

Austin, Texas —  On the Monday morning after the Emmy Awards last month, 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 LAX.

By 8 a.m. they were at their gate, sprawled out. Seen as a subspecies, TV comedy writers look like who they are -- 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 Nov. 3, 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 and 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 L.A., then head to Austin for a research trip. It all sounds a little bit 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 mega-church (Texas-speak for a very large church) and Action Propane in Leander, the writers would meet 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 would be given $150 in cash and a suck-up pad -- show-speak for the notepads 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 bit 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. “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.”

One year the writers 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.

Most shows don’t have a world. They have sets, and craft-service tables, and actors with agents, but no world. With “King of the Hill,” it is possible to land at the Austin airport, rent several cars and, after checking into the downtown Driskill Hotel, go looking for Arlen. 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. 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 the 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.”

Physics, mathematics and ‘Beavis’

Compared with Greg Daniels, Mike Judge is more idiosyncratic and less sociable, and his sense of communion with the entertainment industry is fraught with doom. He grew up in Albuquerque, where he had a paper route and was in the post-Boy Scout Explorers. He has a degree in physics from UC San Diego and later dropped out of the University of Texas in Dallas, where he was working on an advanced degree in mathematics. Judge, who appears to be a self-taught savant, also spent several years playing bass in a blues band called Anson Funderburgh & the Rockets. Then he got into making animated shorts, which led, in 1992, to Judge creating and/or perpetrating upon the public “Beavis and Butt-head.”

The show moved Judge and his family to New York, where MTV is headquartered, but he didn’t stay long; in 1994, as the “Beavis” craze was mounting, Judge high-tailed it out of Manhattan, choosing to settle in Austin. MTV built him a recording studio in a suite of offices and Judge, more happily cocooned, video-conferenced on “Beavis and Butt-head.”

Judge, 40, works similarly on “King of the Hill.” He comes to L.A. during the summers to surf (he has a place in Malibu), but otherwise remains ensconced in Austin, developing various feature-film ideas as a follow-up to his 1999 film, “Office Space,” and voicing Hank and Boomhauer from his studio.

Almost immediately after checking into the Driskill, the writers went to Judge’s office to discuss their two-day itinerary. They convened in a large room dominated by a pool table and ringed by musical instruments, including a “Beavis and Butt-head” double-necked guitar. Judge demonstrated some pedal steel guitar and then stood shyly beneath a framed drawing from R. Crumb’s comic book “Mystic Funnies.”

Most of the faces in the room were unfamiliar to him. Except for Judge and Daniels, the original “King of the Hill” writers have moved on. Nowadays, the show is being run by the writing team of Altschuler (John) and Krinsky (Dave), who joined “King of the Hill” after Fox’s initial 12-episode order.

They are not Lampoon guys. Judge is conflicted about Lampoon guys, since he tends to associate them with shows where people sit in a room “trying to get each other’s references.” “King of the Hill” has long had a mix of Lampoon guys and native Texans, among others. Altschuler, 39, grew up in Illinois and North Carolina, the son of an anthropology professor who decided, when Altschuler was 15, to rejoin the Merchant Marines (Altschuler promptly bought himself a trailer for $3,000 and kept house, on his own). Krinsky, also 39, is from Florida. They met as freshmen at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and, after graduation, struggled to make ends meet in Hollywood for a decade, living out of a Burbank two-bedroom. Krinsky was a bellman at a Beverly Hills hotel, Altschuler delivered room service at a Hyatt. Once, when they were trying to become rich screenwriters, Altschuler and Krinsky found themselves pitching a remake of “The Sound of Music” as a Pauly Shore vehicle.

Now Judge wanted to know if Cohen was in the room. He had two to choose from -- Greg Cohen, a new writer, and Etan Cohen, the Cohen to whom Judge was referring. (There was also previously an Alan Cohen on “King of the Hill,” who was partnered with Alan Freedland; they were referred to as “the Alans.”)

Etan Cohen, soft-spoken and wearing a Boston Red Sox cap, indicated his presence. He is a 28-year-old Orthodox Jew who wrote for the Harvard Lampoon and freelanced his first TV script -- an episode of “Beavis and Butt-head” -- while he was studying at a yeshiva in Efrat, south of Jerusalem. He wrote the script during breakfast. “In the yeshiva culture, there’s a real sensitivity about wasting time,” he explained.

Cohen, it turned out, is collaborating with Judge on several film projects, including a sequel to the animated feature “Beavis and Butt-head Do America,” and a comedy, at one time called “3001,” in which a man of average intelligence is cryogenically frozen for a thousand years. By the time he’s thawed out, this average man has become brilliant, because the country has gotten stupider.

Asked later why he chose to collaborate with Cohen, Judge said: “He comes from a smart place, but he’s really good at writing dumb.”

Animation with a moral center

As television, “King of the Hill” is counterintuitive. Its characters are static, realistic-seeming drawings that move and talk, as opposed to static, realistic-seeming actors who move and talk. The show’s stories build logically from character and place, and they manage to be subversive and sweet. This can be confusing in a medium in which shows scream about a star and a premise (“It’s Ritter! And he’s a dad!!!”), then look around for a story, and a place, like so many emperors last-minute-shopping for clothes.

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’s KTTV in Los Angeles, and in prime time the series returns this year to Sunday nights at 8:30, behind “The Simpsons,” where it enjoyed its best two seasons in the late ‘90s, averaging more than 15 million viewers.

Although Fox still has “Futurama” in its Sunday night lineup, that series has not been renewed; it is on this season because new episodes have already been made. For networks, animation is a dense process that is difficult to control, forcing decisions well in advance of ratings. It takes as many as nine months to complete an episode of “The Simpsons” or “King of the Hill,” because so much creative and physical labor is involved -- a thicket of recording and rerecording, of storyboarding and re-storyboarding, of waiting to see a rough version of the animation, called animatics, which can also be revised -- all before an episode is sent off to South Korea for the images to be minted on cels. Because the process is so fractured and drawn-out, topical jokes are committed at your own peril.

But in 1997, prime-time animation was trendy, and Judge was even trendier. Along with Trey Parker and Matt Stone of “South Park,” he was supposedly part of a band of misfit auteurs whose rudimentary animation was directly proportional to the crudeness of their humor, with characters who passed gas and barfed and belched, like puppet shows gone horribly bad.

The trouble with lumping in “King of the Hill” with “South Park” or “Beavis and Butt-head” is that although all three shows are deeply mischievous, “King of the Hill” is the only one with a moral center and a deeply ingrained sense of place. Arlen, Texas, says Judge, is anywhere you find “white guys and engines and beers.” But it is also a place where the Mega Lo Mart is forever crowding out the little guy and a fellow can’t go hunting without bumping into a bunch of Hacky Sack-playing tree-huggers.

To that end, 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 bestseller in the mid-’90s, argued that a regulatory-happy government was crowding out good old-fashioned common sense with laws that inspired lunacy. This, standing in front of his fence with his beer and his friends and his otherwise unperturbed freedom, is the thinking of Hank Hill.

“Andy Griffith is back and he’s pissed,” is one of the ways in which Johnny Hardwick remembers thinking of Hank Hill. Hardwick, who voices Dale, was the first writer Daniels hired, after seeing him do Texas material at a stand-up comedy showcase in L.A. After six years in the writers’ room, Hardwick recently bought a large, handsome house in Austin that features a working teepee in the backyard.

On Monday night, after barbecue at the Ironworks and gunplay at Red’s, the writers headed over to Hardwick’s house for beers. Hardwick was wearing a T-shirt that featured Vice President Dick Cheney’s face, with a dark, Hitler milk mustache. “Got oil?” it said.

Inspiration from on high

Greg Daniels was in the passenger seat of a rental car. Kit Boss was driving. The writers had split up and fanned out. They had their suck-up pads. “We Buy Ugly Houses,” the billboard said.

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. On “King of the Hill,” Arlen has been visited by a tornado and a freak ice storm, but not by a flood. That’s what prompted Daniels, Boss, Altschuler, Dan Sterling and Etan Cohen to go to the American Red Cross offices for a meeting with a panel of flood-relief workers.

An alarmingly serious discussion ensued about flood relief. “Do you find interesting senses of loss that you didn’t expect?” Altschuler asked Lois Heger, a disaster-related mental health specialist. Heger talked of the person who mourned a favorite can opener. She went on to describe a range of reactions to a flood’s devastation, and to a shelter, whose paradoxical purpose is to provide a haven for the dispossessed while preparing them to go back home. There are those, Heger noted, who find shelters to be homier than their sad lives at home (story line for Bill?), and those who don’t trust the shelter hierarchy (story line for Dale?).

That evening, some of the writers went to a Baptist singles mixer at the mega-church. Christy Stratton sat in the lobby of the Driskill Hotel, chatting with Annette Rushing and Kay Davis. Rushing runs the Little Miss Austin pageant, and Davis’ 5-year-old daughter is a former winner. Stratton, who came to “King of the Hill” after writing on NBC’s “Three Sisters,” was working on a story in which Hank Hill’s live-in niece, Luanne, gets involved in the baby pageant business.

Stratton pumped the two women for information. What do judges look for in babies? (Facial features, onstage personality, overall appearance, she was told.) What kind of disasters can happen on stage? (“Oh, kids throwing up,” Rushing said.)

On the phone two weeks after the trip, when the writers were back in L.A. breaking stories, Altschuler said things looked good for the pageant story line. “We’re definitely going to do a flood story,” he said. “There’s just too many good elements there.”

He was also high on a story involving a propane-fueled mosquito killer and a story two writers had stumbled upon. “Etan and Kit, on the way to the airport, stopped at a tractor place,” Altschuler said. They had run into a woman who apparently has a pet deer, whom she calls Bam Bam, because that’s the sound the deer made when the animal hit her car.