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Nothing gets past Dale Gribble. Nothing except for his wife’s extramarital affair.

One of the classic running gags in King of the Hill is Nancy Gribble’s affair with John Redcorn, and the fact that it’s obvious to everyone in town except Dale. Throughout the original series, there were plenty of times that Dale practically caught them in the act, but his obliviousness made him overlook the obvious. And then there’s the fact that Nancy and Dale’s son Joseph is a dead ringer for John Redcorn

The gag is that Dale is a conspiracy theorist who can’t see the conspiracy going on in his own house. However, over the years, fans have developed an alternate theory. The popular fan theory states that Dale has known about the affair all along but plays dumb. By playing dumb, Dale can continue to act as Joseph’s father, which he sees as the ultimate form of revenge. The theory is so popular that it was briefly discussed in the writers' room when Hulu’s King of the Hill revival was being planned.

“We had talked about some of those theories,” King of the Hill showrunner Saladin Patterson tells Popverse.

Ultimately, Patterson and the writers thought it was funnier to keep Dale in the dark.

“I’m not saying it’s the theory we adopted, but one of the more interesting theories is that Dale is such a conspiracy theorist that in his own mind when he sees the evidence of the affair, his conspiracy theory mind makes him attribute the evidence to other crazy things. That seems true to the character. We certainly operated under the more realistic premise that for Dale it’s a blind spot he has. And it makes the character a little more endearing to the audience because you feel for him. But you feel for him in a good way because you’re rooting for Dale.”

By the end of the original series, Nancy had broken up with John Redcorn so she could fix her marriage to Dale. However, the two appear to have rekindled things in the Hulu reboot.

“Somethings that we revisited, it was more in the mindset of looking at the series as a whole, versus where it ended. The Nancy and John Redcorn relationship was a part of that. Obviously when anyone thinks of the series as a whole, they think of Nancy and John Redcorn having the affair that Dale is unaware of. It did end in a way where they had gone their separate ways, but that’s one where we felt the fans who were going to see the revival, let’s give them what they remember as a whole from the past. And so, let’s kind of take Nancy and John Redcorn back to kind of where they were for most of the last series.”

King of the Hill is streaming on Hulu.

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