Seattle’s homegrown late-night sketch comedy present Nearly Stay! aired on KING 5 from 1984 to 1999. MOHAI’s exhibit relives the greatness.
I went to preschool on Broadway, lived on each nook of Capitol Hill in my 20s, and have written guidebooks concerning the metropolis. I nonetheless scored an abysmal zero out of 5 on the interactive “Pike or Pine” recreation at MOHAI’s new Nearly an Exhibit about Nearly Stay!, proving that a number of the present’s witty observations about Seattle life nonetheless apply, 4 many years after it first aired.
Others appear woefully outdated: “Ballard Driving Faculty” is perhaps one of the hilarious sketches from the late-night comedy present’s 15-year run, however even funnier is the reminiscence of a time earlier than all of the condos and breweries, when the Ballard stereotype was aged Scandinavians.
Nearly Stay!, Seattle’s homegrown late-night sketch comedy present aired on KING 5 from 1984 to 1999, with a brief foray into nationwide broadcasts. Its heyday coincided with Seattle’s grunge-and-Microsoft-fueled growth interval—each of which got here in for ridicule in sketches just like the relationship present, “Studs from Microsoft,” and “Rock Star Fantasy Camp.”
The exhibit ties into the shared second of the present and the town blooming as the remainder of the nation watched, however refreshingly doesn’t fall into the entice of specializing in the forged members who shot into fame: Boeing engineer and comic Invoice Nye (the Science Man, whose eponymous present began as a phase on Nearly Stay!), Joel McHale, and Lauren Weedman.
It focuses as an alternative, because the present did, on the town itself (and, notably, its suburbs). The forged members donated most of the artifacts on show, like Tracey Conway’s polka-dot high from her reoccurring The Worst Girlfriend within the World character—which comes from Jay Jacobs, a as soon as enormous Seattle-based clothes retailer that went out of enterprise in 1999, similar because the present.
Together with the gathering of props and costumes, the interactive recreation, and a quick historical past of the present, the exhibit options a number of alternatives to observe a number of the greatest clips from the present.
For years, I prescribed a rotation of Nearly Stay! clips to all latest arrivals in Seattle: few issues might assist a beginner get oriented higher than realizing that Kent is the place the place it is unlawful for ladies’s hair to be lower than 20-inches huge or that locals flock to Inexperienced Lake for the 17 minutes of Seattle summer season. The Enumclaw Film Critiques, Lynnwood Magnificence Academy, and cameos by native celebrities like Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil defined the town’s quirks and quagmires higher than any resident or guidebook ever might.
Just some steps from the exhibit, a plaque talks about Seattle’s adjustments across the flip of the millennium, after Amazon went public in 1997 and rose from storage enterprise to megacorp. It appears simple to attract the road straight from that sort of massive biz swallowing small entities entire to the 1996 buy of KING TV by Dallas-based Belo, which then killed Nearly Stay! in 1999.
The position of the plaque factors to a different nail within the coffin, too. Seattle’s development cannibalized a lot of its distinctive texture. As neighborhoods misplaced their individuality, the present misplaced the prime goal of its jokes. Nonetheless, a quarter-century after the final episode aired, the Kingdome, avenue nook espresso carts, and the Sonics are gone, however Excessive-Fiven’ White Guys, Billy Quan, and Invoice Nye’s crime-fighting Pace Walker reside on, because of the web and (in all probability) these Studs from Microsoft. And, in fact, Nearly Stay! (Nearly an Exhibit), which is at MOHAI by means of February 23, 2025.
