The Walking Dead season 4 premiered to 16.1 million viewers on AMC Sunday night, the cable channel announced Monday.
The Walking Dead season 4, episode 1 titled “30 Days Without an Accident” premiered to an outstanding number of viewers which beat its last record of 12.4 million set during the season 3 finale in March.
By comparison, season 3 of The Walking Dead premiered to 10.87 million viewers this time last year and ended with 12.4 million. Both of those occasions were the show’s last all-time highs before last night’s record blow out. Season 1 averaged 5.24 million viewers, season 2 averaged 6.9 million, and season 3 maintained 11.4 million.
The show is undoubtedly the most successful drama on cable television. To capitalize on the popularity, AMC announced a couple weeks ago that they are developing a Walking Dead spinoff that will premiere in 2015. It’s not clear if this means they plan to end the current series around 2015, but it does mean that there will be a much larger zombie presence on AMC year round beginning in just two years.
The channel has spun the success of the show into other areas of entertainment. For example, Universal’s Orlando and Hollywood theme parks both host “Halloween Horror Nights” in which they have official Walking Dead mazes. This past week at the Hollywood version, wait times for The Walking Dead maze were listed at over two hours. Other mazes had wait times around sixty to ninety minutes.
Check out our recap of last night’s episode to relive the major events. Do you think the show is off to a good start?