SEATTLE — Gear up, comedy fans – the beloved TV show Almost Live! will return to KING 5 this fall on our streaming apps.
We dug through the archives to rerelease episodes of the show’s 15th and final season on KING 5+, our free streaming app on Roku and Amazon Fire.
We plan to release episodes weekly on Saturdays at 8 p.m., starting Oct. 1. To watch, download KING 5+ for Roku or Amazon Fire to your TV.
Then, tune in to KING 5 to watch new episodes of Saturday Night Live at 8:30 p.m.
You can also catch up on other rereleased Almost Live! episodes at king5.com/almostlive or on the shows tab in our streaming apps.
Almost Live! began its run in 1984 as a talk and comedy show airing on Sunday nights and hosted by Ross Shafer.
By 1988, John Keister had taken over as host and the program was revamped into a sketch comedy series. With the switch to sketch comedy, the show was moved to 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, preceding Saturday Night Live.
Almost Live! caught the attention of Comedy Central in the early 1990s. The cast taped 65 special episodes for the cable channel in the summer of 1992.
Almost Live!’s final season wrapped up in May 1999.
Almost Live! helped launch the careers of Bill Nye the Science Guy and Joel McHale. Nye was an engineer at Boeing who had a knack for comedy when he was added as a regular to the show. McHale was a cast member in the show's latter years who went on to host E!'s Talk Soup and became a cast member on the NBC sitcom Community.
Several recurring sketches on Almost Live! became synonymous with the show and the Pacific Northwest in general, including Mind Your Manners with Billy Quan, the High Five’n White Guys and spoofs of the TV show Cops.
One of the show’s more controversial stunts was an April Fool’s Day prank in 1989. The show staged a fake news report to make it appear as though KING 5 was breaking into Almost Live! programming because the Space Needle had fallen over. The spoof sent the city into a panic.