Hot Lips changed a lot in eleven years. Initially Margaret Houlihan behaved as though a man were the only thing that could complete her life, and she didn't see what richness her life contained. She gained a lot of self-esteem through the years, and she came to realize that what she did, what she offered, was valuable. To oversimplify it, I took each traumatic change that happened in her life and kept it. I didn't discard anything. I didn't go on into the next episode as if it were a different character in a different play. She was a character in constant flux. She never stopped developing.