The Walking Dead, a Review, Retrospect & Some Questions
The Walking Dead premiered on AMC on Sunday night, October 31st, 2010. It’s the perfect night and perfect timing to premiere a TV series based on a popular comic book where a man wakes up from a coma to find himself in a world infected by zombies.
In airing the premiere when it did, AMC netted 5.3 million viewers, 3.6M of them were adults in the 18-49 age-range category. (That’s the shopping demographic everyone loves.) These numbers set a record for the highest rated cable original series premiere for 2010. That equates to a 3.7HH rating. (That’s an estimated 3.7% of all household TVs.) When they added the encore transmissions, the total number of viewers jumped to 8.1 million total viewers. That’s awesome.
In a sense it was the perfect ending to the very popular Halloween horror-thon that AMC calls AMC Fearfest. In their fearfest, AMC aired over 300 hours of content which included 60 movies, that started on October 18th this year. The ended it perfectly!
The Walking Dead (TWD) was written for TV by Academy Award-nominee Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Mist, Collateral). Darbont also directed and produced TWD.
My initial questions about the show were:
- Did the serious amount of heavy viral marketing help the show be the success it was? Media outlets were pummeled with all kinds of goodies and gadgets, who in turn regurgitated the news. (That’s not a bad thing… I’m just saying, as a point.)
- Was premiering on Halloween night an awesome tactical maneuver that netted the comic book adaptation series one of the best moves ever?
- Is the fan base for the comic franchise really that huge?
- Or was the show that good?
In a word, let me quote myself from a later point in this article: “The Walking Dead plot is a superbly balanced flow of slow energetic anxiety.”
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