Nothing is certain but death ... and more death

Just how hot is The Walking Dead? AMC renewed the zombie omelet for another year five days before the fifth season even begins this weekend (9 p.m. Sunday).

Maybe it was the ratings - the highest for any program on TV that doesn't involve field goals. For the uninitiated, that doesn't mean The Walking Dead has the most viewers (15.7 million tuned in for last season's finale). It means the show has the greatest proportion of viewers under 50, which has always been the Moby Dick of demographics for advertisers.

By the way, I think that obsessive focus will soon change as the current economic reality sinks in. Eventually, Madison Avenue will discover those affluent young professionals they imagine they're courting have become neo-hobos, living in their parents' basements while trying to pay off their student-loan ransoms with part-time wages.

Another explanation for why AMC preemptively renewed The Walking Dead: It got an advance look at Sunday's installment, the most powerful and grim episode to date.

You thought things couldn't get any worse for our beleaguered survivors, locked in a train car at Terminus? The evocation of the Holocaust in that scenario is not accidental.

On this show, an epic episode of course entails a stunning number of walkers dispatched with gushy head shots. (That's why I call The Walking Dead a zombie omelet: you can't make it without cracking a lot of zombie eggs.)

Believe it or not, The Walking Dead is not generally considered one of the most violent shows on TV, by virtue of the fact that most of its targets are technically already dead. It gets an exception because of its artificially, postapocalyptically inflated body count. The zombies aren't being killed, more like permanently deleted.

For those of you keeping score at home, Sunday's "No Sanctuary" has it all: zombies feasting on the living, humans killing other humans, even the rarely seen woman killing woman.

That finally is what sets The Walking Dead apart: it's a nondiscriminatory slaughterhouse, a fire sale in which everyone must go - men, women, children.

Other prime-time shows with high-mortality mandates - notably Stalker and Criminal Minds, both on CBS - are often accused of consistently and misogynistically targeting women as the victims of horrific crimes.

It may surprise you to learn men are murdered far more often in prime time than women. The difference is that the majority of male deaths result from shootings. Women are more likely to be stalked and tortured.

We've entered a terribly disturbing new era of television in which we are so bombarded with violence we have become numb to it. In part, you can blame shows like Spartacus and Dexter that actively fetishized killings. (When you have a show about a police blood splatter expert and his job is the most wholesome part of the hour, you've gone too far.)

Believe it or not, some of our most mainstream entertainment - series like Arrow, NCIS: Los Angeles, Sleepy Hollow, even Once Upon a Time - have alarmingly high body counts. You're just so used to it you hardly notice the bodies falling.

Serial killers now roam the prime-time landscape the way cowboys once did. Some shows, like True Detective, The Following, Hannibal, and Criminal Minds, are actually built around them. The others just have serial killers drop by during sweeps months.

To get our jaded attention these days, you have to fashion something truly macabre or revolting. Breaking Bad, for instance, had the head affixed to a desert tortoise and the bomb that cleaved Gus.

Game of Thrones, already one of the most violent shows on TV, topped itself last season with the stunningly graphic death of Prince Oberyn, a.k.a. the Red Viper, who had his head squeezed until it popped like an overripe melon. Was that really necessary? Of course not, but it was shocking.

Shows like Sons of Anarchy are remarkable for their resourcefulness in finding new modes of execution week after week. And say what you will about Boardwalk Empire; it fashions some gruesome ways of dispatching its characters.

Like many of you, I believe I've developed an iron stomach after years of immersion in TV's bloodbath. But I can't sit through an episode of The Knick. Way, way, way too visceral.

And I certainly could have lived without that grotesque stabby-stabby clown on last week's premiere of American Horror Story: Freak Show.

Sunday's installment of The Walking Dead concludes with a touching reunion. It does little to erase the carnage that precedes it. The tender moment is just a lull before the orgy of savagery resumes next week.

If you've ever seen European television, you know our programming is conspicuously more prudish. No sex, please: We were founded by Puritans. But when it comes to violence, supersize us!

215-854-4875 @daveondemand_tv