The Walking Dead season five premiere on Sunday night beat its own cable ratings record to score a whopping 17.3 million viewers. From what I understand of TV ratings, that’s just the people who watched it before 3am Monday morning. When you account for all the DVR viewing that took place the next day and beyond, reports claim that viewership could easily reach 22 million.

This makes The Walking Dead premiere the most watched non-sports cable show in history. If 17 million people are watching that means that 5% of the US population (316 million) tuned in to the Walking Dead premiere on the first day. Yes! Here’s more on the numbers and what they mean:

The season five premiere of “The Walking Dead,” which attracted a monstrous 17.3 million viewers to AMC, [was] the show’s best performance to date. 11 million of the viewers were in the key 18- to 49-year-old demographic.

The ratings record was all the more notable because the episode was up against NBC’s “Sunday Night Football.”

Football is perceived to be must-see TV, the kind of event programming that should be seen live — but for a lot of people, that description fits “The Walking Dead,” too. AMC president Charlie Collier made that point in a celebratory statement when the ratings came in on Monday afternoon.

“‘The Walking Dead’ is one of those increasingly rare shows today that can command a live audience not significantly cannibalized by time-shifted viewing,” Collier said, giving a wink to those who watched the prior night’s bloody premiere.

Still, time-shifting is a factor, as it is for all scripted series; the cable channel projects that once digital video recorder viewership is counted in the ratings, Sunday’s episode will exceed 22 million viewers.

When the series was introduced on Halloween four years ago, it garnered about 5.3 million viewers. At the time, that was a record for AMC; “it’s a good day to be dead,” Collier said when the ratings came in.
Since then, the show has just kept growing and growing. Sunday’s season five premiere brought in almost two million more viewers than last year’s finale.

Ratings expert Joe Adalian of New York magazine said the episode ranked as cable television’s most popular telecast ever, excluding sports telecasts. (Cable’s prior record-holder was the Disney Channel’s “High School Musical 2.”)

[From CNN]

AMC has already announced season 6 for The Walking Dead, and it’s rumored that they’re planning for 12 seasons. We’ll see how that pans out, but it seems likely given how popular this show is. There’s also a sort-of spinoff coming in 2015, to feature an entirely different cast also surviving the zombie apocalypse. Given how entertaining the various Walking Dead webisodes have been, I bet this spinoff will be a success. The show will be executive produced by Walking Dead’s Robert Kirkman, Gale Anne Hurd and David Alpert. The showrunner will be Dave Erickson, a producer on Sons of Anarchy. Advanced details reveal that, like Walking Dead, the spinoff will be character driven of course.

EW has extensive Walking Dead coverage if you’re interested. They have interviews with actors Lauren Cohan (Maggie), Steven Yeun (Glenn), and Chad Coleman (Tyreese), as well as series creator Robert Kirkman and showrunner Scott Gimple explaining how the premiere got made. They also have the badass storyboard for how Carol shot up Terminus and saved everyone.