Compare that to the 80,000 who watched Piers Morgan, who is a different type of "walking dead," representing a couple of "walking dead" news networks (MSDNC and CNN).
I have never been a big fan of the zombie apocalypse genre. In college, I got drunk and watched Night of the Living Dead like everybody else. But I was taking basic anatomy and physiology classes, followed by microbiology and neurology, on a medical school prep track.
Fantasy requires the suspension of disbelief, and I'm sorry, but it takes a squadron of Black Hawk helicopters to suspend my disbelief that high. Dead tissue is dead. Nobody can bring an entire human sized organism back to life. No virus can do it either.
So I skipped the first two seasons of The Walking Dead and the first few episodes of the third. Finally, one Sunday when my wife was away on one of her notorious five-hour-long, 95% browsing, 5% shopping safaris, and I was incredibly bored, I gave it the "five minute test." If you can watch five minutes of a show without reflexively shutting it off or changing the channel, it might be okay.
Well, I was hooked. As others have said on this thread, the character development and group dynamics are as good as anything I've ever seen on cable. The zombies are usually in the background. It's a case study in post-apocalyptic personality development, and personality disorders.
The fact that I believe an apocalypse can happen, for different reasons, finally enabled me to ignore all those zombies. (A superflu epidemic, followed by economic and social collapse, seems most likely to me as the cause of an apocalypse with survivors. But that's just the microbiology talking.)
I understand. I didn’t watch the first season. Zombies? Noooooo. No way.
But, I kept reading raves about it, so I noticed Netflix had Season 1. I decided to watch. Half way into Episode 1, I was hooked. Finished Season 1 via Netflix just before Season 2 started on AMC.
That is also similar to how I got hooked on Downton Abbey.