The Ratings Game

Plot

Vic DeSalvo (Danny DeVito) and his brother Goody are successful New Jersey trucking magnates, but Vic has a desire to make it big as a Hollywood producer. He hawks his scripts and ideas from one network executive to another, but he is turned down at each attempt.

Finally, he meets an executive at a second-rate company who has just been fired for promoting a show that attracted zero viewers. To revenge himself, he accepts Vics script and arranges for a pilot episode of Sittin Pretty, to be filmed. The resultant episode is abysmally awful, both in acting and story, but Vic is only inspired to greater heights. The director and star actor walk out and Vic decides to act as well as write and direct.

He throws a huge party to make himself known to "le tout Hollywood", but no-one comes, except Francine (Rhea Perlman), a statistician at a ratings agency. They fall in love.

When Francine is passed over for a promotion by her philandering and incompetent boss, she reveals to Vic how the ratings system can be bypassed and results fixed by setting up confederates in Nielsen-ratings households to skew the results. They conspire to run a scam that will make Vics programmes the most-watched on television.

The scam works and Vic is voted best new actor at a grand awards ceremony, showing that many viewers (in addition to the confederates) watched his shows. But the agency has now discovered the scam, and as soon as Vic has accepted his award, he is arrested by police.

Francine and Vic are married in jail.

Cast