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.

I went into this updated version of Flash Gordon with basically zero knowledge of the character and its many previous incarnations. I know Flash has appeared in a comic strip, comic books, movie serials and on television, but all of those popped up before my time. Since this is clearly SciFi's attempt to bring the character back and make him appealing to a new audience, I figure my ignorance is beneficial.

So anyway, is the new Flash any good?

Yes, probably.

Good gravy, that was bad.

After being rather impressed with Army Wives, I thought the next original offering from Lifetime, Side Order of Life, would offer something just as engaging and worthwhile, but instead I was given a full hour of cookie-cutter characters, lame dialogue and a plot I've already seen in about eight million other TV shows, movies and books.

You've come a long way, Conan. It's tough to believe you stepped in as host of NBC's late night almost fifteen years ago, but you did, and you know what, for a first timer I think you did okay.

Conan is so comfortable in his role as host now that it's somewhat endearing to watch his first show after all these years. He's not nearly as animated and spring-loaded as he is now. In fact, he appears downright humbled to be stepping into Letterman's timeslot. Of course, after a few years I don't think many of us even look at Late Night as Dave's old show anymore. It's all Conan's game, now, baby.

Do not adjust your web browser. You are now entering the Retro Squad, where we are reviewing past episodes of your favorite shows, in order, every week.

(S01E01) It is clear, right from the opening scene of this first episode of Strangers with Candy, that the people behind the show knew exactly which notes they wanted to strike and exactly the kind of world they wanted to create around Jerri Blank, the forty year old self-described 'boozer, user, and loser' who is trying to get back on track by starting high school all over again. The opening sequence -- a school assembly in which a swaggering policeman warns kids against the danger of drugs while somehow making the drugs seem appealing -- has a great meta moment when the educational filmstrip starts, and shows the policeman making the exact same introduction and then showing a film within a film. Tiny surreal moments like this pop up throughout the rest of the show's run, which is just one reason some of us latched onto the series while it remained largely ignored by most television viewers.