The 1% Club

I'm a big fan of this show and the only person I could think of who would be better than Patton Oswalt at hosting "1% Club" would be Louie DiPalma (heh heh heh). Oswalt got better each week in 2024 and upon seeing a new host blasted on us this year,I didn't have a good feeling. It turned out my suspicion was right on the mark.

Joel McHale talks like a phony,he gives off poor vibes for THIS show and I basically tuned out his between questions banter. It was a mistake going with a new host,imho.

The questions were interesting--as last year--and on the first episode of 2025,I managed to get to the 10% level. I give it a 6 rating--10 for the show and -4 for McHale.

Patton Oswalt hosts this quiz show, which has 100 contestants vying for money.

The questions posed to the contestants get progressively more difficult. Missing a question means elimination, as the pot grows larger. The difficulty of the questions is determined by testing them on groups beforehand. But these are not questions of fact or tests of knowledge; they are designed to test one's abilities of perception and logic.

The major problem is that it is very difficult to design the wording of such questions without any ambiguity. For instance, one question asks the contestants to imagine that some letters are turned 45 degrees, but it does not say on what axis. And it uses the terms "left" and "right", but a clockwise orientation might be more accurate. This might not matter as much if contestants had a minute to consider their answers, but they only get about 25 seconds, which doesn't allow for much trial and error or testing of hypotheses.

The banter with the contestants is hit or miss. Sometimes it is interesting, but mostly it is boring, especially when Oswalt asks a contestant why they missed a question and they are embarrassed, so they give senseless excuses for their answers.

Update 7/16/2024: By episode 7, the banter has improved, with Patton showing his humor. The ambiguity has reduced somewhat. I am bumping my rating up by one.

I'm one of those people who loves brainiac type shows. So of course I thought this was going to be a really great show. The first thing that disappointed me was that they start out way up at a question 90% of the people surveyed got correct and very slowly dwindle down to 1%. I do have a high IQ but I thought these were relatively easy questions. But the majority aren't really questions about intelligence, rather about perception or ability to perceive the twist; riddles. For example one of the questions is: These two states South Dakota and North Carolina can form two completely new state names, what are they? I thought it was very obvious but yet several people got that wrong.

In E2, two questions had more than one way to reach the answer. IE, they say to look at the round numbers to find an equation; they were speaking of the digits that have circles, which is so anti-intelligent you really have to hope for the best in answering because there no rhyme or reason - most people would think they meant the numbers ending in 0. But ironically, if that's the route you chose, you would still get the correct answer.

It should have been more fun than it was. I thought the host was okay but I'm not a fan - I don't really care for hosts who think that teasing is funny or entertaining (and I prefer nice voices). E2 inproves a bit but in E1 it almost becomes an interview of the lady with one kidney. With 100 contestants, we see only a handful and hear from even fewer with the host picking favorites to - well - pick on. I'll also just mention that in episode 3, I felt the guy who was sponsored by The Gates Foundation was a marketing spot. Bill Gates has really become a hated figure after forcing his vaccine on the world and is obviously a paid attempt to soften people's opinions of him. Since his name is on the 2015 covid patent along with Clinton's, we can be pretty sure he's known for a while that there would need to be a vaccine for what we now know to be a relatively benign common cold cousin.

Part of the difficulty is the short amount of time given to reach an answer. But E2 was even easier than E1 almost by leaps and bounds.

But for those saying the 1% question on E1 was unfairly presented, I'm afraid that is just showing that you didn't qualify. The directions that it was a word is literally in the term "password"; while popular to call every digital key that unlocks something a password, a key that uses numbers, acronyms, or symbols is technically a passCODE. But thank you for solving my question of why that was so difficult for our finalists. You would probably hate the film Exam (2009).

I'll continue to watch this as it becomes available, I know the British version is very popular. However I do hope there are more challenging questions to come - but that aspect does make it fun for the whole family. Another example is, basically, in the English alphabet which picture represents the 23rd letter. Several people got that wrong. Of course, initially you do have to figure out that it's discussing the English alphabet. Some reviews mention it's designed to make everyone feel smart. Maybe that's all there is to it but I think a lot of people would disagree.

But the fact is, anyone can get stumped by age old verbal tricks or riddles like "A plane crashed in the desert; where did they bury the survivors", or "If y e s spells yes, what does e y e s spell". Trust me, these do stump many people. This show may be just a series of this type of riddle.

In many of the questions, solving is more easily done by eliminating the wrong answer such as turning the + sign 45 degrees. Only 2 answers had the plus in the 45 degree angle and of those, only one had the 2nd symbol turned almost 90° to the left.

I was one of the people who was initially stumped by the 1% question in episode 3, and yet looking back it was quite obvious.

As I said I'm not fond of the host (never heard of him before) but I don't hate him either. Hopefully they're just on a learning curve right now. If he's a comedian, then I agree he should be allowed to adlib. Might make it more interesting.

I agree with some of the reviews here regarding Patton Oswalt. I do find him likeable in stand-up, television and movies, but it almost seems as if this gameshow-speak was written for him and he's not crazy about it. It's not completely horrible, but seems a bit forced and rehearsed.

I'm not sure why he has to say, "Let's take a look" before every single question, but it gets old quickly. Again, I think it was written that way, and not Mr. Oswalt's creative choice.

It's an interesting premise, and the questions ranged from super easy to difficult (depending on how your brain works!) But when they gave a drum-roll effect to "revealing" what's happened to the pot since 4 people are out (simply meaning $4000 has been added to the pot), I found myself saying, "UGH, come onnn".

I like the concept of this game but was bored with the filler moments. Apparently the producers wanted a show to cover an hour time slot when commercials are added. But 42-45 minutes is too much. If the filler time were reduce this could be 30 minutes per episode. It starts with the chatty talk with contestants. Plus they go back to the same people too much. They have 100 people sitting there and they concentrated on just a few too often. It got old before the end of the first episode. The rolling total for the jackpot is slow, just show the number. Also, the delays to try and add suspense get old too. For later episodes, I just press the 10 second advance to bypass the useless nonsense and stop when I get to the next question. Patton is fine as a game show host but it does seem too scripted. Rating: 10 stars for the game itself, 0 stars for the fillers...so make it 5 stars.