On Easter Sunday, the most watched television show on American cable was not the finale of the five-part miniseries “The Bible.” Instead, more Americans sat and watched the season three finale of “The Walking Dead,” a show about the world after a zombie-like apocalypse.
The 12.4 million people who watched the show on Easter, a day traditionally reserved for joy and celebration of Christian values, saw around 40 deaths. “The Walking Dead,” in its constant depiction of horrendous murder, continues the culture of desensitizing viewers to killing.
In “The Walking Dead,” to kill zombies, a person must destroy their heads, which means the show features many shootings, stabbings, and decapitations. The head-exploding blood is seen on the screen again and again throughout the hour-long program.
It’s not even just the “walkers,” as the zombies are called, that are killed by a bullet to the head. Many innocent people die this way too — especially in the season three finale episode on Easter when a governor kills each member of his militia by shooting their heads. Season three was the most watched cable TV show by adults 18-49 and was the most violent show on TV with an average of 38 deaths per episode, according to a study done by Funeralwise.com.
The study also found that the quantity of deaths on television was almost 12 percent higher in 2012 than 2011. This show has influenced an increase in violence in other movies and television shows. Fewer people were stabbed in the head on-screen before the show aired. In the newly-released movie “Olympus Has Fallen,” the main character, played by Gerard Butler, stabs the antagonist in the head in a “Walking Dead”-like manner. Also, multiple people are shot in the head within the first half hour of the movie.
The show is in its third season and has featured more deaths with each passing season. America’s thirst for violence is detrimental to societal values, and television continues to become more violent with little, if anything to prevent it.
Although the Federal Communications Commission regulates sex, language, and even smoking, it has few restrictions regarding violence. Networks attempt to govern themselves by their own standards and have departments that regulate content. Usually these departments have roughly 100 staffers, many of whom have legal training. Clearly they spend too much time around the water cooler.
The Vice President of the National Rifle Association criticized Hollywood for portraying “murder as a way of life.” He has a point. Even if we refuse to admit it, television has an effect on us. Watching 40 human-looking zombies get killed in a one-hour segment cannot be healthy.
Networks, however, claim that they rely on viewers to tell them how much violence should be featured. And the fan base is actually calling for more violence. Websites like “Top 10 Reasons Why the Walking Dead Should Just Kill Carl,” have 82,000 likes on Facebook.
Carl is a 13-year-old boy on the show. And even Carl killed a person in season three.
My first time watching “The Walking Dead,” I realized that I was the same as the average viewer. I watched with avid followers of the show. In the beginning, I cringed. But the longer I watched the show, however, the fewer times I found myself alarmed at the violence.
Taking away decapitation from “The Walking Dead” would defeat the point of the show. Reducing the amount of deaths per episode or restricting the amount of innocent people killed could set an important precedent for television. With the advent of random shootings at Aurora, Colo., and Sandy Hook, Conn., violence has become a part of American culture. Most psychopaths suffer from not having the ability to tell the difference between reality and fantasy. As Americans continue to become more unfazed by murder, who’s to say the culture won’t produce more killers?
With so much violence already taking place in our society, why desensitize the tragedy of death by replicating it in the most violent ways almost 40 times every week?
