If a TV character can count as a guilty pleasure, I think mine would be Luanne Platter (voice of Brittany Murphy) on King of the Hill. Objectively, I’m not even sure if that character should be on that show. She was not part of Mike Judge’s first draft or first sketches (Judge drew and wrote Peggy, Bobby and Hank, and Hank’s three buddies), and she was added by co-creator Greg Daniels primarily to bring out Hank’s discomfort with sexuality. On the DVD commentary track, Daniels sounds almost apologetic for having added her, saying that she’s a broader character than the characters from Mike Judge’s original conception. (Daniels also created a new, broader characterization for Dale Gribble, making him a conspiracy nut instead of a laid-back beer buddy as Judge originally planned. This was to make Hank seem more reasonable by comparison.) On a show where most of the characters seem authentic, Luanne seemed more based on stereotypes – grew up in a trailer park, mother in jail, aspiring hairdresser, trashily dressed, attends Bible-study groups. She’s grown from that point, but still, she’s the odd character out, so much so that when the writers stopped putting her in every episode, it didn’t affect the show much. Sometimes when she does appear she’s used mostly for “dumb blonde” jokes and/or animated breast jokes.
And yet. She’s one of my favorite characters on that show, I was pleased this year when she finally moved back in with the Hills, and many of my favorite episodes of that show are Luanne episodes or have heavy Luanne content:
- Texas City Twister (Hank pressures Luanne to move back to her old trailer-park home)
- Meet the Manger Babies (Luanne’s sweetly idiotic Christian puppet show with a “nativity scene” that includes an octopus… with only six legs, so she considers calling it a “sextopus”)
- Wings of the Dope (her dead boyfriend Buckley comes back as an angel)
- Luanne Virgin 2.0 (what other show besides KotH would do an entire episode about the “born-again virgin” program?)
- My Hair Lady (Luanne and Bill – another truly wonderful character who’s grown a lot from his original characterization – team up as hairstylists)
I guess what I like best about Luanne is her awkward, kind of sad relationship with Hank Hill – Bobby’s relationship with Hank is the core of the show, but we all know Hank loves Bobby. Hank’s relationship with his niece (in-law) is more ambiguous and he can sometimes be a real jerk toward her; she, for her part, can be whiny and dependent but with surprising moments of strength, and it’s been interesting how these two very different characters have developed a father-daughter relationship without ever really admitting that that’s what it is. Also, especially in the first few seasons, Luanne allowed the show to deal, however obliquely, with issues of class (forgetting that Luanne is there, Peggy launches into a tirade about “trailer trash” and how Bobby shouldn’t do something or he’ll be “trailer trash”). The episode where her mother turns up was pretty heartbreaking, too.
But I finally figured out why I liked the character so much when watching a scene in the most recent Luanneisode (“My Hair Lady”). At the beginning of the episode, Luanne is struggling through community college (remember she dropped out of beauty school to try her hand at college, then drops out of that to go back to hairdressing). As her attention drifts during a professor’s boring, wannabe-hip history lecture, she starts falling into her old habits by styling a classmate’s hair. In a bizarre way, that spoke to me, because I (and many current or recent students) have had the experience of being in college but unsure of what the hell our higher education is supposed to get us, or what good it’s doing us. In deciding that the things she’s studying in college are not the things she’s passionate about doing, she kind of reminded me of me. If I were a hot cartoon woman.