Before Bill Nye was a Science Guy, he was the pride of Seattle. Shit, he was Seattle, in many senses. He worked as an engineer for Boeing, yet harbored delusions of grandeur—first of being an astronaut despite not being a deranged military test pilot, and later, even more embarrassingly, of being a successful comedian. In 1986, he met John Keister after an open mic, which would lead to his first television role. Almost Live! was a Seattle-area sketch comedy show which would air either directly before or after SNL. It really can't be overstated how big of a deal Almost Live! was in Seattle. You talk to anyone in the area over a certain age, and they have a favorite bit.
I'm a little too young to remember watching Almost Live! live, but I do still have a favorite. "COPS in [Seattle neighborhood]" was a recurring sketch lampooning the show COPS and Seattle, but it is also a near-perfect time capsule. Here is "COPS in Wallingford," with Keister patrolling the neighborhood that neighbors the university and was the home of many of the town's artsier types:
An important line here is "If you don't want to flow in harmony, Ballard is just down the street." This theme of displacement and belonging is important. All of Seattle is pretty '90s Wallingford these days. I haven't heard of anyone getting arrested for "no sprouts," but people do actually get denied housing because of auras and astrological signs these days. Let's get back to that displacement theme, this time with a cameo from Nye:
"People here are very friendly," directly proceeding a call for an evacuation bus to remove a guy from the sort-of-poor suburb of Kent—well, just keep that in mind. Finally, though, let's patrol my childhood neighborhood of Ballard, this time with Nye as the main character:
Nye guides this version of the sketch, because even when he was young he had an older man's face, and at the time Ballard was seen as a village of aging Norwegian fishermen. He's really in his element here, and this is probably the sharpest sketch of the bunch just because of how laser-focused it is. It is also utterly alien. Save Larson's Bakery, we might as well be talking about another planet compared to how Ballard is today.
When I was eight years old, Google opened a sprawling office in nearby Fremont. While Amazon was transforming South Lake Union, Ballard became filled to bursting with the ugliest condos you've seen in your life—thanks to the worst search engine left. Seattle now has an estimated 1 in 11 people holding a liquid million. We have reached total NIMBY saturation, with various tough-on-crime Democrats winning local elections based on just how rotten they plan on being to the local homeless population. The typical strategy involves "sweeping" people from one area of the city to another until they eventually die from heat or cold or overdose. I recently saw a house in the Queen Anne neighborhood that had fully fenced around their garbage and recycling cans. An important part of any bad first date in the town is when your prospective partner jump-scares you by asking their smart home to play music or dim the lights. Once again, I must ask who is more nuts: me, or everyone else?
I used to really love Bill Nye. Most everyone my age will remember when the substitute teacher wheeled in the TV cart so as to save himself a nervous breakdown when some kid named Orion accurately cold-read his recent marital troubles. In middle school, I would have cool science teachers who would light a desk on fire with a magnesium road flare and stuff like that, but in grade school our teachers taught every subject, which meant that they didn't teach science with as much excitement as they could. In grade school, the cool science teacher was Bill Nye. But that was just the second act of his career. Let's check in on the third.
When Stephen Hawking died in 2018, Bill Nye inherited the mantle of the English-speaking world's best-known science communicator, in large part due to his show reaching so many public school classrooms. This has put his TV appearances in high demand. But unfortunately, they're a far cry from the work everyone gets nostalgic about. The first time I had seen Bill in a while was on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver in 2019. The episode was about climate change, and while I generally think that show is pretty funny, the writing of this one is a travesty. You would hope that a professional comedian could summon a more interesting angle for his appearance on a joke show than "I'm not a friendly science communicator anymore. I say 'Fuck' now!" Angry Bill Nye brings all the shock value of an image depicting Goofy the dog smoking a blunt.
And it's not just that his comedy is unfunny. He's frustrating when he's being serious, too. Nye recently went on CNN to talk about the insane "once-in-a-lifetime" floods, and it truly sucked. I mean, in the broadest of strokes, he was on the right side of the issue, but being anti-deadly flood is about the lowest possible bar I can imagine. He talked about how we used to back renewable energy more, how he doesn't want NASA's funding to get cut, how he hopes scientific advancement might overcome nature's backlash against scientific advancement. He mercifully only attempts a single one-liner here, calling the proposed budget cuts "out of this world."
Jokes aside, we really do need someone with Nye's platform to properly articulate what put us in this situation, and explain how best to attack it. Unfortunately, he does not do this either. NASA is not good for the environment. Adam Schiff, a guy who Nye calls "very progressive," is not good for the environment. Joe Biden, who gave Nye the Presidential Medal of Freedom, was not good enough for the environment. I don't want to sound like John Zerzan here, but science—at least Bill Nye's idea of it—is not generally good to the environment. Nye started this journey as an engineer at a company inextricably entangled with the military-industrial complex, and despite his man-of-the-people image, he still can't or won't advocate for the true anti-capitalist solutions to our planet's crisis. That would require breaking down the tech companies going all in on AI and its murderous levels of emissions, instead of inviting Microsoft on a show to talk about how cool it is. It would mean committing to unprofitable public transit instead of cars, electric or otherwise. It would mean finally halting Israel's genocide of Palestinians. It would mean imagining a world where—just spitballing here—you couldn't order a Funko Pop from Vietnam and have it on your doorstep within a few days. And really, we don't have time to address every issue individually. The most efficient way to attack all this is simply to move the incentives that our society has away from making money.
I hate to pick on Bill here, but just as Microsoft and Amazon's money transformed Seattle in its image, Seattle's money has transformed progressive politics. I've watched a lot of latter-day Bill Nye, and best I can tell he has never given time to a solution that would require people to consume less. He did, however, give 33 minutes to a show called "What Is Your Pet Really Thinking?," so at least we have that. We need to look at people who credulously ask "But what about the economy?" as if they're asking to rent our babies to use as bowling balls. But the man who once mocked how rich and out of touch Mercer Island is can't really do that anymore. He lives there now.
I think a person's ability to communicate is only improved under pressure. In my dad's side of the family, the only way to really be heard is to have the best joke in the room. This prepared me well for working at Defector. Socially and professionally, if you aren't getting better, you're getting worse, and the anxiety of public performance pushes you to get cleverer in a way that few people can really push themselves to do alone. The trouble seems to be that with enough success, you lose that pressure. You start to believe your own hype. But compared to the typical entertainer, I believed Bill had a way out: science. I would have thought this would keep him from losing touch. But of course science is not as objective as it wants to be. Mercer Island logic will not stop the floods. It will only demand that we drown in real Evian water.
