TVSquad

During last night's CBS party at the Huntington Library, I spoke to How I Met Your Mother honchos Carter Bays and Craig Thomas about the upcoming season. They wouldn't reveal much -- besides the fact that Carter is the only single person left on the staff ... he's available, ladies! -- but what they did tell me was that we'll see the mythical "mother" on the first episode of the season.

We already knew from the season finale that Ted's designated "one and only" took the Columbia University architecture class that he started teaching. But we didn't know when she'd be in that class. Bays clarified it for me: "Oh, she'll be there, in the first scene of the first episode back is Ted and the mom in the same room together."

Of course, that could mean anything, since Ted teaches in a huge lecture hall. Bays wouldn't clarify more than that; all he would say was that "we've narrowed the field tremendously. Up until this point, this woman was somewhere out there in the greater New York metropolitan area. Now, she's in a fifteen-block radius."

Of the many achievements George Carlin had in his long career, one that gets underplayed a bit is that he was the guest host on the first-ever episode of Saturday Night Live -- then called NBC's Saturday Night, thanks to Howard Cosell -- in 1975. Not a bad choice, I'd have to say; since the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players" were only a part of that first episode (there was a lot of music and odd Muppets about ... the show took some time to find itself), they needed Carlin to carry a lot of the comedic load. And that he did, giving the audience a number of his best routines from that time period.

As a tribute to the recently-deceased comedy legend, NBC will air the entire premiere episode of SNL this Saturday night. For those who have never seen the premiere before (it's on a DVD set of the complete first season), it'll be interesting to see how different the first episode is from the SNL format they know and hate-love today. I'll be DVRing it; will you?

To give you a taste, the opening monologue -- an early version of Carlin's classic "Baseball and Football" routine -- is after the jump.