While on the island, the family takes shelter in a lighthouse, where they discover a tape, containing a commercial for the fictitious food product "Gold Top Nuts", onto which they build their fundamental understanding of society.

During a flight home from vacation in Cancun, the family's budget airline runs into a storm, which takes out the engines, resulting in everyone bailing out except them.

They manage to wash ashore on an island, where they make their way to a lighthouse that they find stocked with canned pumpkin pie mix, a broken radio, and a TV set and VCR that only plays the commercial for a product, called Gold Top Nuts.

Deciding to spread the word of their discoveries, they build a raft and escape from the island, landing at another lighthouse, that turns out to be a fancy restaurant.

"Gold Top Nuts" was originally made to air as the mid-season premiere, but the network insisted on opening with "The Curious Case of the Old Hole", an episode featuring Wheels & the Legman, a popular reoccurring plot point in the series.

[3] The episode was directed by Jennifer Graves and was written by Brett Cawley and Robert Maitia, who all co-directed and co-wrote, respectively, the similarly acclaimed American Dad!

[3] When the idea for "Gold Top Nuts" was initially pitched to Weitzman, he wasn’t completely convinced on the episode, saying in an interview that "the jokes are funny, but you’re also constantly asking, “What the hell is going on here?” Our characters are acting so oddly and there were moments through the process where I had doubts.

[3] "Gold Top Nuts" has a noticeably story-driven, less gag reliant plot juxtaposed to the series' usual episode structure.

[1][7] The titular "Gold Top Nuts" are a way to show the slow deterioration of the Smith family's sanity and knowledge on how a society functions, taking all they know about how the world works from the commercial.

Daniel says that "Gold Top Nuts" is similar to them in the way it "buil[ds] upon supernatural circumstances, but still turn[s] into philosophical examinations of not just character, but identity".

Daniel ends his analysis by calling the episode a message about "symbols that people ascribe meaning in are arbitrary and all a part of larger social constructs".