Walking Dead season premiere breaks records

Horror show’s fourth season drew in its largest audience.

With its fourth season premiere on Sunday, AMC’s The Walking Dead drew in its largest audience in the show’s history — 16.1 million viewers and an even more stunning 8.2 rating among adults (aged between 18 and 49). That’s up 30% in the demo from the show’s previous high, according to Entertainment Weekly.

Based on a comic book series of the same name, The Walking Dead is a US television horror show centred on zombies aka the walking dead. A sheriff’s deputy wakes up from a coma and finds himself in a post-apocalyptic world full of flesh-eating monsters and tries to save the survivors.

The show has also once again crushed the broadcast networks. If you combine all the broadcast dramas that aired on Sunday night — Once Upon a Time, Revenge, Betrayal, The Good Wife and The Mentalist — they still don’t match The Walking Dead’s demo rating.

“Sincere thanks to the fans, who have welcomed The Walking Dead back for its fourth season with the highest-rated episode in the show’s history,” said AMC President Charlie Collier.

The Walking Dead also went head-to-head against NBC’s primetime football game in much of the country. AMC said more than five million users discussed the season four premiere on Facebook and Twitter, and the episode generated more than 1.1 million tweets on Sunday, according to Reuters.

AMC, owned by AMC Networks Inc, has been expanding its audience with stylised shows, such as period advertising drama Mad Men which drew a series high of 2.7 million in June this year, and the series finale of gritty drug drama Breaking Bad, watched by 10.3 million viewers last month.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 19^th, 2013.

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