When "Saturday Night Live" hit NBC's airwaves on October 11, 1975, at 11:30 p.m. EDT, numerous broadcast standards were about to be skirted if not outright flouted. Lorne Michaels had assembled a supremely talented cast of Baby Boomer comedic performers and Chevy Chase to, hopefully, transform the once undesirable time slot into a must-watch 90 minutes for people who were busy closing bars or turning in early on their last night off for the weekend.
Michaels needed everything to feel counterintuitive, if not ragged. It was a bracing olio of sketches, music performances (from Billy Preston and Janis Ian), pre-filmed bits, and Jim Henson's proto-Muppet project, "The Land of Gorch." There'd never been anything like it on American television, and the first episode evoked enough laughs to keep viewers coming back for more.
The debut episode's ace in the hole was George Carlin. The brilliant stand-up comic had become a counterculture firebrand thanks to his "Seven Dirty Words" routine, and though he was still a regular presence on network television, the notion of giving him a live set smacked of danger. Would he blurt out one of the verboten words?
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