‘The Walking Dead’: Why season 4 may be far from the end

Dear, “Walking Dead” fans, there’s no need to worry about the zombie apocalypse being a short one. So long as this show continues to constantly pummel anything in its path in the ratings, it is likely that AMC will try to keep it on the air until a real-life zombie apocalypse actually happens.

Speaking this week at the Barclays Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference, AMC Network head Josh Sapan basically said that we have still only scratched the surface on the Robert Kirkman zombie franchise, and there is still so much story left to tell:

“We hope that zombies live forever and we’ve just begun to find out what the post-apocalyptic world is like, so that we’ll be sitting here at the Barclays conference in 2022 discussing the fact that Walking Dead is not over … at that point, I think any one of the companies will have replaced the United States government and we’ll be in a complete free enterprise world in which there are no nations.”

It’s clearly understandable why Sapan would say something like that right now, given that this is the #1 show on TV in adults 18-49, and manages to do it in a competitive Sunday-night time-slot that is on cable, and the total number of available viewers is far less than that of broadcast. This show has proven to be an example of the “if you build it, they will come” theory of quality programming, and no matter what sort of issues the series has had behind the scenes, it has yet to impact the viewing experience in much of any way.

Tell us: Do you think “The Walking Dead” would be a zombie of its former self in, say, season 10? If you want to see some of the cool things that the producers have planned for the show this fall, just pay a visit to the link here.

Photo: AMC