[TV] Parents Television Council Takes Aim at The Walking Dead
Posted by Jeremy Thomas on 12.13.2012
Over the level of violence...
Everyone's favorite conservative TV watchdog group has turned its sights on zombies. You see folks, this is why we can't have nice things. EW reports that the Parents Television Council is going up against The Walking Dead for showing gore and violence while maintaining a TV-14 content rating.
"Throughout its run, the AMC program The Walking Dead has featured some of the most graphic and brutally intense violence and gore imaginable," said PTC president Tim Winter in a statement directed at former Senator Gordon Smith, Chairman of the TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board. "In the current season alone the show has depicted hundreds of scenes of grisly murder both of living and 'undead,' but human, characters. 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."
Winter continues, "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."
Winter continues on in the statement, saying that members of the PTC, whose membership he puts at 1.3 million, have sent "thousands of letters" to AMC asking them to change the content rating but have gotten no response; he is now asking Smith to "immediately take any necessary steps to insure that this program is rated accurately, appropriately and for the audience for which the show is designed."
The PTC became known for going after WWE in the late 1990s; WWE sued by them for defamation in insinuating that children had died as a result of using moves seen on WWE TV, as well for using WWE-copyrighted materials in promoting the PTC. The PTC settled out of court for $3.5 million and a public apology and rescinding of their comments that WWF programming was to blame for the death of any children.
