Mike Judge and the show's own road signs disagree on what city King of the Hill is based in
Ask the man who created Arlen and you get a straight answer. Ask the highway signage inside his own cartoon and you get a different one, roughly 80 miles off.
Judge told the New York Times in 2009 that Arlen is "Richardson, a suburb of Dallas", where he lived while at graduate school. The show's own geography puts Arlen nowhere near Dallas — closer to the Temple and Killeen area in Central Texas, about a hundred miles south.
What Judge has said
Richardson is the on-record answer, and he's described the origin plainly enough: neighbours who were permanently out in their yards with beers, one of whom helped him mend a fence while making it clear what he thought of Judge's DIY. The pilot was conceived as an amalgam of Dallas suburbs including Garland, where he also lived. He has separately said Arlen was imagined as a town like Humble, outside Houston. The name itself reads like Arlington and Garland run together.
Texas took the Richardson version as settled: a 2025 House resolution marking the Hulu revival named the city outright.
What the show says
- "It Ain't Over 'til the Fat Neighbor Sings" — a highway sign puts Dallas at least 96 miles away. Richardson and Garland are both 15 miles from Dallas.
- "As Old as the Hills" — another sign puts Houston about 96 miles off.
- "Happy Hank's Giving" — getting to DFW airport takes about two hours with traffic.
- Drive times elsewhere — four hours to Port Aransas, six to Wichita Falls, an overnight trip to Lubbock, but close enough to Austin for dinner after work and close enough to Mexico for a beer run.
- The Dallas evidence — Cowboys fandom throughout, Tom Landry Middle School, and a revival that opens with Hank and Peggy landing at DFW.
Where the maths puts Arlen
Two independent attempts at triangulation reached the same answer: the fan channel Squirrel Tactics, and G. Allen Finchum, a geography professor at Oklahoma State. Both land Arlen near Temple and Killeen. The show names Killeen and nearby Belton as Arlen's rivals, and Bill works at a large Army base just outside town — Fort Hood sits at Killeen, and is close enough for a drunk Bill to make off with a tank.
The mayors are not neutral
Richardson's mayor, Amir Omar, told Texas Monthly in 2025 that the connection is something the city has quietly taken pride in, while conceding Arlen is only partly theirs. Garland's mayor, Dylan Hedrick, was less diplomatic about it, and reckons the name gives the game away:
"You drop the g, you drop the d, and there you go."
Judge has always described Arlen as an amalgam, which is the tidy explanation for why the signage never matched. The untidy one is that a cartoon can be 96 miles from Dallas on Sunday and a Cowboys suburb on Tuesday, and nobody at Fox was checking.
For the record: the original run produced 259 episodes across 13 seasons between 1997 and 2010, and the revival arrived on Hulu on 4 August 2025.
