Late last year, AMC's The Walking Dead set the record for the highest ratings for a basic cable, non-sports program. It might be fair to assume that when going up against the highest rated Grammy Awards since the '80s, the show would suffer a bit of a slump in its return Sunday night. Instead, it once again posted the… largest number of viewers for a basic cable, non-sports program, with 8.1 million viewers, 5.4 million of them in the coveted 18-49-year-old demo. That this comes after the first half of the season, which was roundly criticized by both critics and fans for being too slow-moving, is even more remarkable, in some ways, than the show holding up against the Grammys so well. According to Entertainment Weekly, if you add in the number of people who watched the rebroadcast at 11 p.m. Eastern, the show's audience grows to 10.1 million viewers (and that number will only rise as DVR numbers come in). Our greatest fear from this news: Somebody somewhere is looking at the huge numbers for Walking Dead and the Grammys and is quietly contemplating a show where the zombies sing.

Advertisement