TVSquad

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.

Jay Leno is in trouble with the WGA. When he returned to late night television on Wednesday, he told his audience that he wrote the jokes for his monologue and that he wasn't relying on "scabs" to do his writing. It was a proud proclamation on his part, but it turns out that he was still violating the rules of the WGA strike. As a member of the WGA, he's not allowed to write. The WGA has met with Leno and let him know he broke the rules, and now the guild is trying to determine whether Leno needs to be punished.

Other late night hosts like Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Kimmel returned without writers and obviously without any sort of scripts. Conan spent a good part of last week spinning his wedding ring on his desk. David Letterman and Craig Ferguson also returned last week, but they have writers because Worldwide Pants, which produces both shows, came to an agreement with the WGA.

Angry fans have quite a bit of power over CBS these days. The network tried a little experiment last week with Craig Ferguson's talk show, and it ended up failing miserably. Fans probably noticed that at about 3 minutes into the show, Craig and Co. broke for a commercial. The commercial break forced Ferguson to pause in the middle of his monologue for a word from sponsors and then resume his routine afterwards.

I want to know who on earth thought this was a good idea in the first place? It sounds like some money-grubbing accountant's idea... not someone who actually watches late night television. Amazingly, Craig agreed to the experiment. Fans got pissed off and inundated his show with angry e-mails, forcing an end to the I-coulda-told-you-it-was-a-bad-idea experiment. Now that it's kapput, Ferguson says "I will never do it again. It is over."

There was a great piece on last week's episode of This American Life (the radio version) by John Hodgman about how television has changed his life. John Hodgman is, as many of you know, a regular contributor on The Daily Show and also plays "P.C." in those popular Mac ads.

His monologue on This American Life was about suddenly becoming recognized when he's at Radio Shack or at the airport and not knowing how to respond to the stupid things people say to him. For example, the employee at Radio Shack was just shocked that Hodgman would be shopping at Radio Shack in Greenfield, Connecticut! Hodgman lays out all his star struck encounters in his typical Hodgman style, making the things we all do and take for granted sound just plain stupid. I highly recommend listening, it's the first "chapter" and you can listen for free on iTunes for the next week. It can also be streamed at This American Life's official website.

BTW, that episode also had an interesting interview at the very beginning with an astronaut who talks about how much she loves Battlestar Galactica, and also how The Borg figured out the ultimate spaceship.

If you can't stay up late enough to watch Leno (and you actually like him), iTunes is your new best friend. Starting today, NBC will offer clips from the previous night's episode of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. That means Jay's full monologue and comedy sketches (like JayWalking and Headlines) will be available for $1.99. You can also get a season pass-type-deal and get 20 of Leno's monologues a month for $9.99.