The Walking Dead crawls towards Season 4

Posted December 22, 2012 - 23:22 by David Konow

It’s apparently been tough times for The Walking Dead, which just goes to show you that even zombies have to deal with the yin and yang of life.

Yes, the series is currently on top of the world in terms of ratings and was renewed for a fourth season. However, The Walking Dead has also coming under fire for excessive violence, while one of the top executives behind the show recently left.

So it comes as little surprise that AMC is renewing The Walking Dead for season number four, and this is a no brainer because the show has been making ratings history this season.

But Glen Mazzara, who is the show runner who replaced Frank Darabont, is now departing the show. No reason was given why Mazzara is leaving the show, Darabont was fired for not wanting to cut down the show budgets, and in a statement Mazzara said, “I have told the stories I wanted to tell and connected with our fans on a level that I never imagined. It doesn’t get much better than that.”

Now onto the zombie violence. Before George Romero reinvented the zombie, the undead just roamed around, looked scary, and would occasionally strangle somebody. Once Romero made Night of the Living Dead, zombies were vicious killers who ripped people apart and ate them, because they needed fresh flesh and blood to keep going.

These days, you don’t have zombies without extreme gore, it’s what makes these lurching guys a threat. It’s also extreme violence that kills them again. You have to shoot ‘em in the head, or chop their noggin’ off to end their brain activity. And good gore can be a lot of fun if you’re not squeamish. True horror fans have always loved the work of gore meisters like Tom Savini and Greg Nicotero, who is also executive producer for The Walking Dead.

The people who don’t understand this, of course, are parent / teacher groups. Indeed, as Entertainment Weekly notes, The Walking Dead recently came under fire from The Parents Television Council (PTC), which is deriding the show’s TV-14 rating for being “inaccurate,” and as EW points out, the statement against The Walking Dead apparently wasn’t checked for proper grammar and punctuation before it went out.

For example, “In the current season alone the show has depicted hundreds of scenes of grisly murder both of living and ‘undead,’ but human, characters.” The primary complaint, again, is the rating is inappropriate, and they want it changed.

There’s no comment so far from AMC, but it goes without saying that in all of these cases, whether it’s movies, a cable show, music, video games, whatever, it’s up to the parents what their kids watch, listen to, and play in the house. Yes, maybe the ratings and warnings should be a little stronger, I’ll give them that, but in many of these cases, when these groups claim they’re supposed to be protecting our children, it’s more often a disguised censorship agenda.

As for the man who brought so much great gore to zombies in the first place, George Romero, you can’t blame him for being irresponsible. If you were around back then, when the original Dawn of the Dead came out in 1979, it came out without a rating from the MPAA, and nobody under 17 was supposed to get in to see it, even with a consenting legal guardian.

While I’m not sure if today’s 14 year olds are sophisticated or mature enough to take The Walking Dead, I’d be willing to bet yes, I also believe it should be up to each individual family whether the kids can take the undead or not. A lot of grown people think zombies are real, why isn’t anyone trying to keep them from watching The Walking Dead?