I went to preschool on Broadway, lived on every corner of Capitol Hill in my 20s, and have written guidebooks about the city. I still scored an abysmal zero out of five on the interactive “Pike or Pine” game at MOHAI’s new Almost an Exhibit about Almost Live!, proving that some of the show’s witty observations about Seattle life still apply, four decades after it first aired.

Others seem woefully outdated: “Ballard Driving School” might be one of the most hilarious sketches from the late-night comedy show’s 15-year run, but even funnier is the memory of a time before all the condos and breweries, when the Ballard stereotype was elderly Scandinavians.

Almost Live!, Seattle’s homegrown late-night sketch comedy show aired on KING 5 from 1984 to 1999, with a short foray into national broadcasts. Its heyday coincided with Seattle’s grunge-and-Microsoft-fueled boom period—both of which came in for ridicule in sketches like the dating show, “Studs from Microsoft,” and “Rock Star Fantasy Camp.”

The exhibit ties into the shared moment of the show and the city blooming as the rest of the country watched, but refreshingly doesn’t fall into the trap of focusing on the cast members who shot into fame: Boeing engineer and comedian Bill Nye (the Science Guy, whose eponymous show started as a segment on Almost Live!), Joel McHale, and Lauren Weedman.

It focuses instead, as the show did, on the city itself (and, notably, its suburbs). The cast members donated many of the artifacts on display, like Tracey Conway’s polka-dot top from her reoccurring The Worst Girlfriend in the World character—which comes from Jay Jacobs, a once huge Seattle-based clothing store that went out of business in 1999, same as the show.

Along with the collection of props and costumes, the interactive game, and a brief history of the show, the exhibit features multiple opportunities to watch some of the best clips from the show.

For years, I prescribed a rotation of Almost Live! clips to all recent arrivals in Seattle: few things could help a newbie get oriented better than knowing that Kent is the place where it's illegal for women’s hair to be less than 20-inches wide or that locals flock to Green Lake for the 17 minutes of Seattle summer. The Enumclaw Movie Reviews, Lynnwood Beauty Academy, and cameos by local celebrities like Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil explained the city’s quirks and quagmires better than any resident or guidebook ever could.

Just a few steps from the exhibit, a plaque talks about Seattle’s changes around the turn of the millennium, after Amazon went public in 1997 and rose from garage business to megacorp. It seems easy to draw the line straight from that type of big biz swallowing small entities whole to the 1996 purchase of KING TV by Dallas-based Belo, which then killed Almost Live! in 1999.

The placement of the plaque points to another nail in the coffin, too. Seattle’s growth cannibalized much of its unique texture. As neighborhoods lost their individuality, the show lost the prime target of its jokes. Still, a quarter-century after the last episode aired, the Kingdome, street corner espresso carts, and the Sonics are gone, but High-Fiven’ White Guys, Billy Quan, and Bill Nye’s crime-fighting Speed Walker live on, thanks to the internet and (probably) those Studs from Microsoft. And, of course, Almost Live! (Almost an Exhibit), which is at MOHAI through February 23, 2025.