‘The Walking Dead’ is the deadliest show on TV, study says

“The Walking Dead” is a violent TV show, but is it the most violent TV show on the air right now?

It is if you include the zombie body count. According to a study conducted by the website Funeralwise.com, “The Walking Dead” was the most violent show on TV in the fall of 2012, with 308 dead (or undead) bodies shown in the eight episodes aired of the show’s third season. That works out to about 38 bodies per episode.

The second deadliest show on TV is Cinemax’s actioner “Strike Back,” which aired 10 episodes last year and averaged 26 deaths per episode. NBC’s “Revolution” was No. 3, with 11 dead humans per episode. (Animals weren’t counted in the study.)

The rest of the top 10 shows included “Nikita,” “Supernatural,” “Arrow,” “Fringe,” “NCIS: Los Angeles,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “Once Upon a Time.”

Overall, the study found that the number of deaths on TV was over 12% higher in 2012 than in 2011 and that guns were the No. 1 cause of deaths, accounting for 44% of all deaths on TV. (Except for the poor zombies, which died excessively from knives, blades and arrows.)

But lest you think every TV show is this violent, it’s worth bearing in mind that the top three series account for 40% of the total corpses on TV (a grand total of 598 dead bodies). The other 37 shows in the study averaged just three per episode.

One thing that was in short supply on TV, however, was funerals. Despite all the death, only 11 funerals were shown on the surveyed TV shows in the fall. That was up from eight funerals which were depicted in 2011. To be fair, zombies don’t need funerals.

While “Walking Dead” may be at the top of the list because of its zombie carnage, bear in mind that “Game of Thrones” could come out the topper in the next study, if the approaching horde of zombies at the end of Season 2 is any indication of what will happen during Season 3.

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