This is a list of episodes from the first season of King of the Hill, which aired on Fox from January 12 to May 11, 1997 for 12 episodes.

The showrunners for the season were Mike Judge and Greg Daniels.^[1] New episodes of Judge's first animated series Beavis and Butt-Head continued to air on MTV when the first and second seasons of King of the Hill were airing on Fox, with the series eventually wrapping up in November 1997. A Beavis and Butt-Head spin-off titled Daria also premiered on MTV in March 1997, although Judge had no creative involvement with this series, and didn't voice any of the characters like in Beavis and Butt-Head.

The opening sequence utilized digital ink and paint, however, the episodes themselves were still done using traditional cel animation, and they would continue to be animated this way up until the eight season.

The season originally aired Sundays at 8:30–9:00 p.m. (EST) on the Fox Broadcasting Company.^[4][5] It aired following The Simpsons, another adult animated series. King of the Hill's strong ratings helped The Simpsons post its first increase over previous season ratings.^[6] To coincide with Fox's broadcast of Super Bowl XXXI, a 20 second skit titled "Super Bowl Moment with Hank Hill" aired on January 26, 1997, in which Hank tries to cut in line at a supermarket checkout on the day of the Super Bowl. This skit utilized digital ink and paint like the opening sequence did, and was later included on the DVD release of the first season.^[7]

On August 1, 1997, King of the Hill's first season premiered on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. In Australia, the season began airing on the Seven Network on November 23, 1997, and was also aired on Fox8 the following year. Between 1998 and 2010, the rest of the series would continue to be aired concurrently on both Seven and Fox8 in Australia. On the Seven Network, the series was initially airing during prime time, although during the 2000s it typically aired during weekend afternoon timeslots, alongside children's programs. In 1998, a French-Canadian dub of this season began airing in Quebec. This dub removed the Texas references and set the show in rural Quebec, changing the names of all characters and locations. It continued up until the eight season.

In December 1997, Entertainment Weekly critic Ken Tucker named King of the Hill as one of the best shows to debut that year. He wrote, "it was a good year for new cartoons, but I'll take King of the Hill bracing openheartedness over South Park's clever but monotonous heartlessness any time. TV’s most original, complicated new character was Hank Hill—middle-class Texan, political conservative, social libertarian, Willie Nelson fan—who exploded every white-guy small-screen stereotype in place since Archie Bunker."^[8]

In his 1997 review for the Pilot episode, Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "whereas The Simpsons sees animation as an opportunity to expand physical reality and tour plot realms far beyond the resources of regular sitcoms, King of the Hill is visually myopic in its storytelling." Rosenberg also wrote that King of the Hill lacked "the panoramic vision and often slashing irreverence and social observances of The Simpsons, which, although not the hilarious achiever it once was, remains a cleverly written farce and commentary on pop culture. On Sunday, for example, hapless Homer's eyewitness reports of an eerily glowing, ghostly figure in the night bring Dana Scully and Fox Mulder of Fox's own The X-Files to Springfield [in] a series whose points of reference, from sci-fi to goofy TV newscasters, are as topical and eclectic as ever." Rosenberg added that, "despite being more conventionally humanoid and recognizable than the exotic universe of The Simpsons, the premiere of King of the Hill is light on media signposts, limiting itself pretty much to benign mentions of NBC's Seinfeld."^[9] A December 1997 article from Time magazine titled "The Best Television of 1997" stated that, "The Simpsons is still the cleverest comedy on TV, and King of the Hill creates a world with far more specificity than any live-action sitcom. Both are smarter, funnier and, in fact, more human than Friends or Seinfeld."^[10]

In June 1997, Katy Daigle of the Hartford Courant labelled the show as being an improvement over Mike Judge's other animated series Beavis and Butt-Head, claiming that, "it has substance to its consistently on-target humor."^[11] The Capital Gazette described it as "The Simpsons meets Beavis and Butt-head in the Texas burbs" in February 1997.^[12] Phil Gallo of Variety commented in his review of the Pilot that, "it's a break from all the over-the-top sitcoms Fox has scheduled in hopes of building off the Married... with Children franchise. Humor here is far more sedate. Plenty of folks won't get it." Gallo added that the animation is "neither as crude as B&B or as sharp as The Simpsons, which Film Roman also produces."^[13] In a 2006 review of the DVD release of the first season, Dorian Lynskey of British publication Empire gave it four out of five stars, commenting that "it seems odd that the Hills were once dismissed as Simpsons copyists. Compared to Springfield's helter-skelter surrealism, Arlen, Texas is doggedly low-key and the animation is as flat as the landscape." Lynskey added "Texan-born creator Mike Judge's natural feel for small-town rhythms and ordinary lives makes this the truest and kindest of the post-Groening animated sitcoms."^[14] In 2021, Ben Sherlock of Game Rant considered the series to be more original than Fox's later adult animated show Family Guy, which premiered in 1999. He wrote "King of the Hill and Family Guy are both adult-oriented animated comedies capitalizing on The Simpsons success, but only one is called a rip-off."^[15]

The season was released on DVD in Region 1 (North America) by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment in 2003. In Region 2 (the United Kingdom) and Region 4 (Australia), it was released during 2006. It is the only season of the show to be released on DVD in Japan, with the Japanese release featuring a dubbed version. The second season was also dubbed, and aired on Japanese television, but was never released on DVD in the country. The original 2003 DVD release for Region 1 included three DVD cases in a cardboard box. The Region 2 and Region 4 releases instead held all the season's discs in a single case. In 2010, the Region 1 DVD was reissued with similar packaging to the other regions.

The season two episode "The Company Man" is included on DVD releases due to its production code. On Hulu and most television reruns, this episode is still ordered as part of the second season.^[29]