Tom Tucker comes to the door, having heard of the Griffins becoming a Nielsen family, and asks Peter for some suggestions to change the show.
He gathers many TV producers (including J.J. Abrams, Mark Burnett, Dick Wolf, Jon Hamm and Kelsey Grammer) to discuss ideas to make their shows better again.
Peter then has four TV producers to make 15 workplace comedies where people talk to the camera for some reason, thus breaking the fourth wall.
Burnett is asked by Peter to give him a reality show where people do horrible, unforgivable things to each other for embarrassingly small sums of money.
Peter then has two TV producers leave to make a show about horrible New Jersey freaks and tells Wolf to give him the same Law & Order six times.
The final scene shows that Herbert has repaired the Nielsen boxes which Mayor West destroyed and is using them to make his own changes to TV.
"Ratings Guy" was directed by James Purdum, who storyboarded half of the episode himself and partially worked on the animation with Brian Iles.
Purdum had joined Family Guy as an animation director when he directed the fourth season episode "The Cleveland–Loretta Quagmire" and has since served as a supervising producer.
Commenting on his appearance in the episode with Entertainment Weekly, Abrams said: "I know Family Guy is edgier than The Simpsons or Bob's Burgers, but I love the show personally.
Actress and stand-up comedian Sandra Bernhard guest-starred in the episode as a fictionalized version of herself, in a cutaway gag critiquing celebrity culture and political figures.
Homer had previously appeared in the episodes "Movin' Out (Brian's Song)" and "The Juice Is Loose", both of which he was voiced by Jeff Bergman.
Actor Michael Clarke Duncan guest-starred in the episode, appearing briefly in a cutaway gag as a guy wearing cowboy boots.
"Ratings Guy" is one of Duncan's final roles before his death from complications following a heart attack a month earlier.
A confessed fan of Family Guy, Wolf had previously called the show's staff to appear in an episode, but he was rejected many times.
It focused more on the production end, how the industry grovels and panders to the masses in hopes that they can mechanically churn out desirable programming at the lowest possible cost, instead of striving to produce something of quality and finding a way to make it work.
[2] Carter Dotson of TV Fanatic gave the episode three and a half stars out of five, saying "Yet the show painted such broad strokes, as it does tend to do, that it didn’t really have a whole lot to say, other than that they think idiots determine what’s ‘popular’ and what isn't.