Welcome to Arlen, Texas. A perfectly average town with perfectly average people living perfectly average lives. In this case our story focuses primarily on Hank Hill and his family and friends.
Following a quick introduction to Hank and his friends Dale Gribble, Bill Dauterive, and Jeff Boomhauer, we get to the focus of this first episode: The dynamics of the Hill family – Bobby’s love of comedy, Hank’s old-fasioned nature, Peggy’s motherly affection, and the odd living situation of Luanne, Bobby’s cousin.
Bobby isn’t the best at sports – in fact, he’s generally pretty terrible, and while playing baseball he gets hit by a fly ball, giving him a black eye. This by itself wouldn’t be anything crazy, save for the fact that Hank has a bit of a temper and while out with Bobby shopping at Mega Lo Mart when he loses his temper at a sales clerk. This incident, combined with Bobby’s black eye, starts a rumor of Hank abusing Bobby, resulting in a social worked being called in.
In a stroke of bad timing, the social worker arrives just after Hank injures himself while working on his car, coming in with a rage against Bobby for bouncing a ball annoyingly on a wall. He doesn’t calm down during the interview with the social worker, either, creating quite the bad look at the situation in the Hill household.
After a bit of an aside with Dale and Bill trying to “fix” Hank’s truck and Peggy sharing some embarrassing information Hank goes on an oddly patriotic rant about how sickened he is by the situation at hand, finally kicking the social worker out of the house.
The social worker eventually goes on to interview the rest of the neighborhood, giving us a look at the strange dynamics of the marriage of Dale and his wife Nancy, as well as another experience with Boomhauer’s crazy speaking style. The social worker eventually hears Bobby and Dale’s son Joseph mimicking Hank, which the social worker mistakes for Hank actually talking.
He goes to try to get Bobby to leave the house, but Bobby chooses not to. The social worker, named Anthony, reports back to his boss that the neighborhood is “redneck city” only to be reprimanded by his boss for not talking to the baseball coach about the black eye.
Social services calls the house to tell the Hills that the investigation is off. Bobby answers and rather than telling his family, he keeps it to himself and takes advantage of the situation to cause chaos and get away with it. Eventually, however, the social worker boss visits the house to talk to the family in person and thus Peggy and Hank find out the investigation is off.
After a bit of a talk between Peggy and Hank on just how Bobby feels about him sometimes and why he didn’t want to tell Hank the investigation was off, Hank goes out to have a rather heartwarming talk (as best he can) with his son, reminding him he loves him no matter what.
Final Rating: 3.0/5
A solid enough start to the series, which focuses on, of course, the family dynamics. This episode helped to set the show as happening in a more realistic world than most animation, and introduced us to the basic characteristics of the core cast quite nicely. While some characters would change a bit over the shows run much of what was established in this episode would stay true to the very end.