‘The Walking Dead’ season 3: PTC rips show for violence, rating; no one is surprised

There are some stories that you can just see coming from almost a mile away: a group that is trying to encourage family-friendly viewing disliking a show about zombies and dismemberment is one of them. The Parents Television Council has taken a number of shows to task over the years for airing graphic content that they deem inappropriate for young viewers, and for whatever reason they are now choosing to after the highest-rated show on cable in “The Walking Dead” strangely a little more than a week after it wrapped the first half of its season.

Interestingly enough, though the organization’s president in Tim Winter is not actually trying to take the series off of the air; rather, his primary grievance seems to be more the fact that “The Walking Dead” carries with it a TV-14 rating despite it being stuffed full with violence across the board:

“Throughout its run, the AMC program The Walking Dead has featured some of the most graphic and brutally intense violence and gore imaginable … The intensely violent content has included depictions of the cleaving of human skulls with a machete, extreme gun violence including graphic depictions of blood and brains splattering after gunshot wounds, and the use of a sharpened human bone as a weapon to stab another character.

“Clearly, this is content appropriate to an adult-only audience, but AMC has rated every single episode of The Walking Dead as suitable for a 14-year-old child.”

We usually stand against most of the PTC campaigns, and their concern would be a little more valid here if there was some sort of measure that could be gained from changing the rating. for the episode. However, a TV-MA rating seems a little too harsh for a show that contains no nudity or excessive use of the f-bomb, and it’s not like changing a rating would do anything at all to discourage 14-year olds from watching. The only thing it would do would be causing a conundrum for AMC and advertisers in putting on a show with that adult a rating at 9:00 p.m. Eastern on basic cable. The PTC can complain about this rating all they want, but we doubt it will change anything.

If you want to see some of what is coming up later on down the road for “The Walking Dead” season 3, you can do so over at the link here.

Photo: AMC