Game show The 1% Club swaps out Patton Oswalt for Joel McHale

In what must clearly be a reference to the classic philosophy problem The Game Show Of Theseus—in which every element of a popular quiz show is swapped out one by one, while contestants answer “Is this still the original game show?” for a thousand bucks a pop—game show The 1% Club is getting a pretty massive overhaul alongside a season 2 renewal. The Prime Video series, hosted by Patton Oswalt, is now not either of those things, actually: It’s now a Fox show, hosted by Joel McHale.

Per Variety, it sounds like the basic format of the show—which, like all quiz shows, is rooted in the natural human impulse to feel smarter than the guy sitting next to you, only more so—will stay intact: 100 contestants are asked a series of brainteasers and “common sense” questions and are then steadily whittled down by their own mental failures. (Part of the show’s appeal is that it goes lighter on trivia than most of these kinds of series, ensuring it’s not just Jeopardy! dorks ruling the playground.) The last people standing get the chance to win $100,000 by answering a question that “only 1 percent of Americans” can get right, while Patton Oswalt does some fun game show patter. All of which will presumably still be there for season 2 except for, well…

Anyway, McHale, who, we are suddenly forced to remember, is already part of the Fox family courtesy of the three (?!) seasons of Animal Control he’s starred in, will be taking over the hosting gig on the series, which is based on a British series that has been steadily metastasizing across the planet since 2022, as successful game show concepts so readily do. (There are also versions of the series either running, or in the works, in Australia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, Turkey, and Ukraine. The British game show people do not fuck around when they find a globally workable premise like this.) Although it was originally announced as a Prime Video show, the U.S. version ended up running as a hybrid of streaming and traditional broadcast, with episodes airing on Fox before being broadcast the next day on the streamer. Amazon is apparently no longer involved in production as of season 2, with duties now handled entirely by BBC Studios Los Angeles.