Nobody Cares If You Stop Watching The Walking Dead

After last nights BRUTAL premiere, some people are vowing to stop watching. SPOILER: Nobody cares.

I've seen my fair share of messed up stuff on television shows, heck, I watched two and a half seasons of HBO's Girls, but I've never felt the need to announce that I'm going to stop watching. I just stop watching. Immediately after the shocking deaths of the premiere, the internet exploded with people saying they were going to stop watching because it "was too much" or "too graphic." This is a terrible excuse because this isn't the first time the show has been violent.

The entire premise of The Walking Dead is that people are trying to survive the zombie apocalypse by any means necessary. The show features violence every. single. week. Most of the violence is inflicted on zombies, but there is a good amount of human-on-human murdering. And that's what you get from the show. It's weird that these two deaths are the tipping point for some. Let's ignore the fact that the character of Noah was smeared against a revolving door by zombies, Carol gunned down a child (after the child had killed her younger sister), the Wolves machete'd an entire neighborhood, and The Governor sliced off Hershel's head with a sword. Those things were all OK but the brutality of Negan using Lucille is suddenly too much? C'mon!

It's only "too much" because these were characters that you actually cared about. And that is a testament to the show's greatness. These death's weren't meaningless: they served the greater purpose of making Negan scary. To show that humans can be worse than the undead. And they did it fantastically.

If you feel the need to stop watching The Walking Dead, that is your decision. But don't act like you didn't know what you were signing up for 6 years ago. To be fair, I wanted to stop watching during the Alexandria arc because it was incredibly boring. The current arc of the TV show is based on the best parts of the comic. Negan is fantastic and if you decide to stop watching because he Lucille'd two people, you can. But you will be missing out. If you stop watching, just stop. No need for outraged Twitter or Facebook rants. The Walking Dead isn't going to re-think what they're doing because Becky and Steve in Indiana didn't like what happened. You aren't that special. The cast and crew are going to continue being the number 1 rated show on cable and continue to count all that money.

In conclusion, I'm really excited about where the show is going this year. I liked how anxious and unnerved I was by a show that had lost some of its nerve the past few seasons. The fact that people want to quit watching has me incredibly excited to see what else they have planned. Maybe I'm a terrible person because of that. The jury is still out. But I cannot wait for next week because Ezekial is coming and he's great in the comic. Just remember that it's just a TV show and everything is going to be OK. Oh, and the fact that you are making a big stink about not watching probably gave the show even more publicity. The Walking Dead thanks you for you contribution to its ratings.