Saturday Night Live to air its debut episode Saturday, as tribute to host George Carlin

As a longtime TV critic, I can't help seeing the cynical side of this move -- which could be an easy way to garner extra weekend viewership at the time when the show is in reruns.

But it's cool, nonetheless, to see Saturday Night Live pay tribute to George Carlin by re-airing their first episode this Saturday, featuring the late comic as the very first host. It may be a measure of how mainstream the show is now that the seminal figures who populated the show back then are mostly gone - Carlin, Belushi, Radner, Michael O'Donohue and Richard Pryor, to name a few. Even the regulars from back then who are still around -- Dan Aykroyd, Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, to name a few more -- shed their dangerous edges quite a while ago.

At the very least, young SNL fans can get a sense of what the show was like when it really was a dangerous ride. Here's part of his monologue from that show, courtesy of Hulu.com: