The show debuted on October 2, 1955, the Sunday evening of the day in which the Dodgers beat the Yankees in Game 5 of the World Series (they'd win it in seven).
We see the famous sketch profile of Hitchcock's head and hear Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette. Our host (in black and white, of course) says these are going to be “stories of suspense and mystery.”
Our first episode, Revenge, is about a young man and wife in a trailer park (but they are not played as trailer trash, as they likely would be today). She's an ex-dancer, recuperating form an injury, and she's attacked while he’s at work. Their neighbor is Aunt Bee from The Andy Griffith Show.
The whole episode is quiet and slow by today's standards, but it's nice to see the lost art off screen violence. There's a nice twist ending, which is the show's trademark (but not all follow this form).
After the episode, AH returns to assure us that the bad guy was caught and punished. The Production Code at the time didn't let someone get away with a crime. With episodes of only 25 minutes, they'd often just have Hitchcock clean it up after the fact (as the series progressed, he did so half-heartedly or ironically).
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