Pat Cashman hopes new podcast reminds us of happier times

Almost Live may be familiar to many locals as the Seattle sketch comedy show that was a Northwest icon. One of the voices of Almost Live, Pat Cashman, is putting together a podcast called Almost Live: Still Alive in which he talks with every member of the cast.

Cashman joined the Dori Monson Show on KIRO Radio to discuss the project and the enduring popularity of the show.

“I think of it as a snapshot in time of a Seattle that was just like a little toddler, just starting to grow up. Microsoft had come along but there was no Amazon, there wasn’t any of the other things that we associate with Seattle. There certainly wasn’t the population. I think what made the show popular … rather than focus on national parodies and satires, it was intensely local,” Cashman said.

“It was jokes about Ballard and Kent and Lynnwood and that kind of stuff and people really liked it. It was their show.”

Two events helped Almost Live grow in popularity in the early 90s: One was King 5 moving Saturday Night Live to 12:05 so Almost Live could get the coveted 11:35 spot, and the other involved something apparently happening to the Space Needle.

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“We were also very lucky in that Lorne Michaels had left Saturday Night Live — a great producer — and they were in their lowest ebb. I think you could say with some confidence and they weren’t very good. And so it gave license for Almost Live — if we were just pretty good — people wouldn’t mind waiting for Saturday Night Live, and that’s kind of the way it worked out,” Cashman said.

“It was probably 90-91 when that change was made. And the show, which never had gotten good ratings until then, just took off because that’s where its audience was … The other thing that made the show take off was an incident where the Space Needle was reported to have fallen over — and we talk about that quite a bit on this podcast — but it became national news. I won’t go into the whole story, but you couldn’t buy that kind of publicity.”

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Does he think if a similarly talented cast came along today that somebody could do a 2020 version of Almost Live? Because the show often made fun of very silly things like how people drive in Ballard, and now the things that everybody’s dialed into in the city is about homelessness and division over cops and so on.

“It would be a daunting task, but I am of the belief that you could … In fact, I think that could be a real salve for the Northwest right now if there was some local humor to leaven in with all the stuff that is so horribly unpleasant,” he said.

Cashman started the podcast to take a nostalgic look back at what at least seemed to be a simpler time, considering that we now find ourselves in the midst of a bleak pandemic.

“During this COVID time, I thought wouldn’t people like to think back to happier days, happier times when Almost Live — a show that traded in local humor and stuff — reminds people of how it used to be or at least how it seemed to be. And maybe it would be nice for nostalgia’s sake and maybe we could even think about the days when things will return to some sort of normalcy again,” he said.

“Happily, every Almost Live person is still on this side of the turf. I thought I better talk to all these people now, especially since I’m the oldest.”

Check out the podcast here.

Listen to the Dori Monson Show weekday afternoons from noon – 3 p.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.