The 1% Club, on Prime Video and Later Fox

After Who Wants to Be a Millionaire the set design for gameshows has gotten fancier and flashier, but the questions have gotten steadily dumber. Take for instance The Wheel, if it still streams on Peacock after NBC canceled it. This one has all the sweeping spotlights, but the questions are a little different. An ability to recognize patterns will help you quite a bit if you are a contestant on the new American adaptation of creators Andy Auerbach & Dean Nabarro’s The 1% Club, which premieres Thursday on Prime Video, before later airing on Fox, starting June 3^rd.

Charles Van Doren had his issues, but he was a learned man, so it would be interesting to see him compete on a show like this. The set-up ought to outrage all those critics of The Bell Curve, because it presupposes a distribution of intelligence, but, of course, it makes no demographic assumptions therein. 100 contestants are given $1,000 to risk on a series of questions. According to statistical surveys, 90% of Americans answer the first question correctly. The next question should have an 80% success rate, steadily diminishing down to the titular 1%, for a share of a pot that could potentially be as large as $100,000.

These are not trivia questions or applied mathematics. There might be a bit of reading comprehension involved in early questions, but most depend on logic and the analysis of sequences. You could well be smarter than the participants, but you really have to watch. If you merely half-listen while multi-tasking, you will not see the sequences or spatial relationships the problems refer to.

This is somewhat different concept for a gameshow that clearly worked quite well in the UK, where the franchise originated, before spawning international editions in Australia, Israel, Germany, France, and now the USA (with future editions coming soon to Ukraine and several other nations). Evidently, there is an app that will allow viewers to play along. Yet, it doesn’t seem like it would be as fun to watch with others as Fox’s The Floor, which probably had most of its viewers blurting out answers as soon the images flashed across the screen.

The Wheel, on NBC

We do a terrible job teaching civics in the United States. When I say terrible, I mean absolutely pitiful. If you did not already suspect as much, this new game show will convince you. There is definitely room for a new high-end quiz show in the tradition of Jeopardy. This isn’t it, but to be fair, the participants probably suffer from dizziness induced by its human roulette wheel format in creator-host Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel, the American version of which premieres tonight on NBC.

McIntrye has already had great success with the first three seasons of the original Wheel in the UK. That is also why McIntyre is hosting the American version, instead of Ryan Seacrest, or whoever. The structure is kind of clever. Six celebrity judges are seated around the titular wheel and a randomly selected contestant pops up from the middle. Each celeb functions as an expert in a given category. The contestant choses a category and “turns off” whomever they think knows the least about the subject. When the wheel spins, if it lands on the “canceled” celeb, they lose their turn, but if it lands on the specialist, they win double, if together they come up with the right answer.

Of course, many of the categories are about inconsequential fluff like Beyonce Knowles. When the category is something legitimate, like “elections,” the results can get ugly—really ugly. They also lack a regular “expert” the show can rely on for a snarky quip, like Paul Lynde, the perennial center square on Hollywood Squares. On the first three episodes provided for review, pro-wrestler and star of The Marine franchise Mike “The Miz” Mizanin probably displays the slyest humor. Someone like Ben Stein could really add a lot to the show, with his quick wit and command of what should be considered general knowledge, but he probably wouldn’t be down for the spinning.

Would I Lie to You?, on CW

There was a time when gameshows featured panelists like Dorothy Kilgallen and Bennett Cerf, who would have been welcomed at any proper society dinner party. Then the Quiz Show scandal happened and game shows started to lean into dumb. The level of intelligence improved when they started recruiting comedians, who can at least think on their feet. This latest bit of primetime gameplay is based on a long-running British series, but it is also sort of a throwback to the original To Tell the Truth. However, there are no average Joe contestants nor money at stake. Only pride and bragging rights are on the line in Would I Lie to You?, which premieres Saturday on the CW.

The format is pretty simple. Celebrity contestants take turns reading a purportedly true anecdote from their lives off a note card, allowing the opposing team to ask questions to determine whether it is the truth or a lie. Eventually, in a later round, each team member tries to explain their unlikely connection to a prop-person, staring out at the camera with a blank expression—and again only one of them is telling the truth.

Frankly, based on the first three episodes, the host, Aasif Mandvi (who was great in the series Evil) is the funniest of all the participants, so far. On the other hand, it is rather telling former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s internal lie-detector only works about 50% of the time, at best—but that doesn’t necessarily mean his team didn’t still win, not that it really matters.