What Patton Oswalt Learned About Hosting Game Shows for The 1% Club
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The post What Patton Oswalt Learned About Hosting Game Shows for The 1% Club appeared first on Consequence.
The 1% Club is a unique game show in that it sets out to test a very specific sort of intelligence. While Jeopardy challenges the general knowledge of trivia nerds and Wheel of Fortune plays with letters and idioms, the new British import hosted by Patton Oswalt showcases puzzles built on reason and pattern recognition.
“It is definitely not about what facts have you remembered and can regurgitate,” Oswalt tells Consequence. “Each question is its own thing in the moment, that you have to use your logic to try to suss out. It’s really cool.”
Each episode of the show begins with 100 contestants, who are eliminated over the course of the game if they get one of the increasingly difficult questions incorrect. (Each contestant does get one “pass” to skip a round, should they choose — something that can come in handy later in the game, should they make it to the final rounds.) The final question is one that only one percent of the country would be able to answer correctly — meaning that any winners are thus anointed into the titular club.
If this sounds like a tough challenge, know that Oswalt understands: “Before each show, we’d go over the questions, and I never got beyond the 60% question. I don’t have a very logical brain. I have a repository of weird trivia, but being light on my feet mentally? Not that good.”
While the comedian has hosted plenty of awards ceremonies, The 1% Club is Oswalt’s first time hosting a game show — in fact, he says, “I never even thought of doing a game show. But they sent me this proposal and a bunch of episodes of the original BBC version, and it was great. I loved the format, I loved the energy of it, and it ended up being a ton of fun.”
If you’re curious, awards shows and game shows are pretty different, in terms of what they require from the host. “The one thing that is similar is you’re there to keep things going when the energy flags. At an award show, if someone comes out and kills it, you don’t try to follow that, but if someone comes out and there’s a dip, then you come out and try to pep [the audience] back up and give the next person a chance. Whereas with game shows, it’s way more involved and way more ongoing and immediate, but that is the one similar aspect. You’re there to keep the plates spinning.”
When it came to finding his own hosting persona, Oswalt didn’t look to any past MCs for inspiration. “There’s game show hosts that I really like: Richard Dawson, Steve Harvey, Drew Carey and people like that. But this is such a different animal from those shows that I didn’t want to ape any of their mannerisms, because I didn’t feel like they would fit.”
Instead, he decided to essentially model his approach on crowd work, “the way that I do standup when I’m talking to people in the audience.” Crowd work is a little easier when producers are able to feed you advance details about the contestants, but Oswalt notes that “you don’t know, when you ask them about their life, what they’re going to say back to you. So you’ve got to listen to them in the moment and then run with that.”
Those moments arrive after each round, when Oswalt takes some time to talk to contestants who did get the question right — or got it wrong. Through these ongoing interactions, a few dominant players amongst the 100 emerge, though there’s still room for surprises: “There are those contestants who have been very, very quietly getting it all right and not using their pass, and then suddenly we’re at the 5% question and it’s like ‘Whoa, where did you come from?’ They’re this whole new factor in the game, and I love that so much.”
As for how the show might evolve going forward, Oswalt says that “there will always be new twists, because what’s great about the show is it doesn’t matter how you get to the right answer, it just matters that you can figure it out. And so we’re going to have a lot of different personalities and different working brains that will get us there, and we’ll be talking to those people. That will always be evolving.”
Also, Oswalt notes, “I think that once it’s been on the air, a lot of people that wouldn’t normally go on game shows will go, ‘Maybe I should go on this game show.’ Because people that are like, ‘Well, I don’t have a college education…’ That doesn’t matter on this show. It just doesn’t matter. So I think that’s going to be really important.”
The 1% Club (Prime Video/Fox)
Between hosting, stand-up, and more extensive acting work, Oswalt remains one of the busiest men in Hollywood: So far just this year, he’s appeared in four animated series, cameoed in Season 3 of Hacks, played a small role in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, and was a series regular on the Apple TV+ historical drama Manhunt. Fortunately, he says, The 1% Club is not “a massive time commitment. I’m still touring all the time — I have a whole summer of tour dates, and we tend to get those early so then I can work the tapings of the show around it. It’s weirdly convenient.”
Adds Oswalt, “I’m very, very grateful. I have a variety of creative outlets. That’s a blessing.”
The 1% Club will debut first on Prime Video beginning May 23rd, before making its broadcast TV premiere on Fox June 3rd. It’s a strategy Oswalt loves: “It’s like when they open it like a little sleeper indie film in a couple of theaters, wait for some word of mouth, and then open it wide. Or you take a Broadway show on the road and then you bring it back. It feels like the same thing. So we’ll see if it works.”
What Patton Oswalt Learned About Hosting Game Shows for The 1% Club
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