The numbers are in and last night’s Fear the Walking Dead premiere has set a new television record as the biggest cable television premiere of all time.
What is it about zombies? I’m sure there are deep-seated psychological and sociological reasons for the wild popularity of the zombie genre. Something about our latent fear of our own inevitable mortality, and the ability to satirize it with what are essentially live-action cartoons serving to minimize the terrors of the same. I’ll leave it to the head-shrinkers and graph-compilers to dig into it with more depth. I’ll settle for reporting on the observable, obvious effects.
FEAR THE WALKING DEAD, the spin-off and companion series to AMC’s THE WALKING DEAD, broke all records with its premiere, becoming the highest rated television show debut in cable TV history. This sets the bar pretty high for future episodes, but don’t expect the ratings to drop off too much in the coming weeks. Also we can expect the new series to provide a ratings “bump” to the original show. You can’t spit without hitting a zombie these days, and that’s just going to become more the norm, as we can expect to see walkers everywhere. Will we see the typical burnout effect come into play? Is it inevitable that zombies will become so “over” (in Carnie speak) that they will become passé? Will fans stop being afraid of, and instead become sick of, the walking dead?