Unless you live under a rock, you know there was some controversy last week after The Walking Dead executive producer Gale Anne Hurd said they may have toned down the violence on the show. However, showrunner Scott M. Gimple and Greg Nicotero recently told EW that Negan's barbed-wire baseball bat brain-beating barrage was intended to be traumatizing:
“The violence in the premiere was pronounced for a reason. The awfulness of what happened to the characters was very specific to that episode and the beginning of this whole new story. I don’t think like that’s the base level of violence that necessarily should be on the show. It should be specific to a story and a purpose, and there was a purpose of traumatizing these characters to a point where maybe they would have been docile for the rest of their lives, which was Negan’s point. But I will say again, the violence in the premiere was for a specific narrative purpose and I would never say that that’s the baseline amount of violence that we would show on the show. If we’re ever going to see something that pronounced, there needs to be a specific narrative purpose for it.”
Greg Nicotero adds:
“As brutal as that episode 1 was, it’s still part of our storytelling bible, which is what the world is about. I don’t think we would ever edit ourselves, and I think — even after looking at that episode 1 again — as tough as it was for people to watch, I don’t think we would have done it any differently. I don’t think we’ll ever pull ourselves back. There is definitely a difference between violence against walkers and human on human violence, but truthfully, we’re serving our story.”
Like I mentioned in a previous article, I gave up watching The Walking Dead after Frank Darabont left. Still, I tuned in for the season premiere because even I had to know who The Comedian beat down, Wu Tang-style, with his spiked bat like "Bow." Turned out it was some (HUGE) dude with a ginger mullet. Meh. Whatever. And then… Oh, boy…
Like many of you, I've seen some gnarly stuff in my day (A Serbian Film, Irreversible) and while Glenn's eyeball-incident didn't come close to the horrors found in those films, it was the most graphic thing I, personally, can remember ever seeing on TV. Not that there's anything wrong with that…
Toned-down violence, or not, The Walking Dead returns to AMC on Feb. 12.