41 years ago, HBO, then the most subscribed-to pay cable network in the United States, decided to expand its original programming (which consisted largely of stand-up comedy specials and boxing) with the uplifting, based-on-real-life film “The Terry Fox Story.” Though it didn’t set the world on fire, the movie did receive decent reviews, which gave competing premium cable channels the itch to try their hand at making movies of their own.
And so, in 1984, Showtime took a crack at film production with a zany comedy called “The Ratings Game.” While this film was notable at the time for being the channel’s first original movie, it’s now most significant for being Danny DeVito’s directorial debut. If this is the first you’re hearing of “The Ratings Game,” there’s a good reason for that. It’s a sporadically funny film based around a dated Nielsen ratings scam that’s basically Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” for television. DeVito stars as a New Jersey trucking magnate who moves to Hollywood to pursue his dream of making it as a writer-producer of sitcoms. He then backs his way into getting an awful series called “Sittin’ Pretty” on the air, and, with the assistance of a ratings company employee (Rhea Perlman), concocts a scheme that will make it seem like it’s one of the most popular on the air.
The clips of the fake shows generate the biggest laughs in the film. However, DeVito does get some assistance from two future stars of one of the most beloved sitcoms to ever hit prime time television.
The Ratings Game was the movie about something that came before the show about nothing
Early on in “The Ratings Game,” none other than Jerry Seinfeld turns up as a CBS executive who informs DeVito that his ideas are out of step with what’s popular in Hollywood. “The networks aren’t buying Italians, Jews, Puerto Ricans this season,” he tells DeVito. “They’re buying gays, alcoholics, child molesters.”
Seinfeld wasn’t completely unknown when “The Ratings Game” first aired in 1984. He’d made his first appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” three years earlier, and had become a familiar face there and on “Late Night with David Letterman.” At the same time, he wasn’t as well known as his soon-to-be “Seinfeld” co-star Michael Richards, who’d been involved in an infamous (staged) dust-up with Andy Kaufman on ABC’s short-lived sketch comedy series “Fridays.” Richards also appears in “The Ratings Game” in a slightly more significant role as one of the schlubs hired by DeVito to break into a Nielsen house and watch “Sittin’ Pretty.”
If you’re curious about “The Ratings Game,” it’s currently available to stream on Prime Video. Again, it’s amusingly outmoded in the streaming age, but there are enough funny bits to perhaps justify 102 minutes of your time. It might’ve also been the film that made Hollywood perceive DeVito as more than just the angry dispatcher from “Taxi.”
