What show is so powerful it stood strong against The Grammys? What show is so big it keeps breaking records, even when its last record made TV history?
The Walking Dead of course, and now that the show is back from its mid-season break, its new ratings high proves that absence absolutely made the heart grow fonder for its fans.
Now that the numbers are in, here’s the score: 12.3 million tuned in to the latest episode of The Walking Dead. This is the biggest audience for the show yet, as the previous record for the show was the season debut in October, which brought in 10.9 million. As The Wrap also points out, AMC played encores of the show at 11 p.m. and midnight, which brings the viewer total for all three airings to a whopping 16.6 million.
Charlie Collier, the president of AMC, told The Wrap, “When you look at numbers like this, the first thing that comes to mind is how grateful we are to the fans of the show. They embrace The Walking Dead in a way that we wanted to believe was possible but we never take for granted.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Walking Dead outperformed The Big Bang Theory, Modern Family, and NCIS in the ratings as well. Riding the wave of zombie success, Chris Hardwick, founder of Nerdist, also launched his own Walking Dead wrap up show, The Talking Dead, and 4.1 million viewers tuned in for it.
There’s another new, interesting twist that’s come to the Walking Dead. The L.A. Times tells us the show will also have re-reruns of previous episodes in black and white. The Times reports this is to make the blood look less hideously red, and also to make the show look more like Night of the Living Dead. It will definitely be interesting to see what transferring the show to black and white will do for Walking Dead, and it could make it even cooler to watch, who knows?
So if you’re tired of zombies, they’re just not going to go away anytime soon. Like the survivors of The Walking Dead, you’re just going to have to figure out how to co-exist with them, because as these ratings show us, they’re definitely sticking around for a while.
