While Jeopardy! will always be my number one game show (including its various primetime specials like Celebrity Jeopardy! or the recently concluded Jeopardy! Masters 2025), with the premiere of The 1% Club season 2 on Fox on June 10 I decided to give that show a try.
Though there was a good bit of buzz about The 1% Club when it premiered last summer, I never got around to trying it out. Add my boss’ recommendation for the UK version of the show, I figured it was worth a shot. Yet my expectations weren’t high. But as the game got deeper and the questions more complicated, I was surprised to find myself leaning forward in my chair trying to suss out the various answers.
For anyone who may need a quick summary, the basic premise of The 1% Club is that 100 contestants start the game and are challenged to answer logic-based questions. The difficulty of each question is graded by how many people in a wide survey done prior to the show answered each question correctly.
The first and assumed easiest question is one that 90% of people got right, then it goes down to 80%, 70% and continues down until you get to the 1% question. If you get the question wrong you’re eliminated. Anyone left standing when the 1% question arrives gets to try and answer it for a potential $100,000 grand prize.
I’ll be honest, the actual show part didn’t do much for me. I get having 100 contestants in parallel with the idea that the game often comes close to the percentage of people in the prior survey got these questions right, but it’s too large of a group. After every question, host Joel McHale talks with a player or two and gets to know them a bit, but it’s for about 30 seconds and then we may never hear from them again.
Or, in the case of at least one player that made it to the final question on the June 10 episode, McHale never talked to them (at least not that made it on the TV broadcast). I had no idea who they were and yet they had a one in six chance of winning the game. Even though other game shows may not actually give us that much more time to know contestants, with a smaller group it at least feels like we do.
Speaking of McHale, who took over hosting duties in season 2 of the game show from Patton Oswalt, he's fine. He got to have some fun banter with the contestants, but again it was often brief before he just moved on to the next question.
What did work were the questions. To be honest, it didn’t start off great, as the 90% and 80% questions felt very easy to me, but that is kind of the point of those questions; a high majority of people got them. Where my attention really started to peak was a question that featured three iconic movie quotes where you had to identify which one was incorrect.
As a movie buff, this felt right up my alley, but I was surprised that I was having some trouble figuring it out at home. I did guess correctly — they changed Judy Garland’s line “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore” from The Wizard of Oz to “Toto, I have a feeling we’re in not Kansas anymore” — but it had me double-guessing myself.
From there the questions presented interesting thought experiments that occasionally I could get with little issue and others had me unsure, including the final 1% question, which I definitely did not get.
What makes The 1% Club worth watching is not the people competing for the grand prize, or even the antics of Joel McHale. It’s really just fun to be presented with these brain teasers and compete for yourself on the couch.
The 1% Club airs Tuesdays on Fox and then streams on-demand on Hulu.
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