Scott Garfield/AMC

We’re about to discuss zombies, so you can see the cannibalism joke coming a mile away: viewers ate up the premiere of “The Walking Dead,” the new AMC series, adapted from the comic books written by Robert Kirkman, about humans struggling to survive in a world overrun by flesh-eating ghouls. The first episode of the show, which had the good fortune to make its debut on Halloween night at 10 P.M., was watched by 5.3 million people, AMC said, making it the largest audience for any original series on the channel. (By comparison, the season finale of the AMC drama “Mad Men,” on which the dead do not reawaken and are simply made fodder for black comedy, drew 2.44 million viewers.) Not surprisingly, “The Walking Dead” performed particularly strongly with audience members aged 18 to 49, drawing 3.6 million viewers in that demographic. In a statement, AMC president Charlie Collier said, “It’s a good day to be dead,” and we’ll just leave it at that.