Negan's Double Whammy on 'Walking Dead' Premiere Inspired Some Passionate FCC Complaints

That eye-popping 'Walking Dead' premiere didn't go over well with these 'traumatized' viewers.

December 15, 2016

Dropping a flurry of well-timed mutterings of the word "fuck" is one thing, but brutalizing two beloved characters using a bat wrapped in barbed wire? That's apparently too much for some Walking Dead viewers, as revealed in Federal Communications Commission (FCC) documents obtained by the Daily Dot via the Freedom of Information Act.

The FCC logged "more than a dozen" official complaints from Dead viewers in the days following that controversial premiere. Though "some" of the complaints stemmed from mere technical issues, the majority were sent from people who peeped Negan's back-to-back emotional carnage and found the whole display a bit too torture porn-y for their tastes.

"While a fan of the show, I think this episode went too far in gore and graphical nature for Television [sic]," one complaint reads. "This would have been rated R or NC-17 in the theater. You don't show ISIS beheading people on TV, nor should you allow someone to be beaten with a barbed-wire baseball bat." According to the Dot, that complaint is actually one of two referencing ISIS beheading footage.

Others highlighted the inherent hypocrisy of chopping out words of the fuck variety while amplifying the violence, with one viewer from Connecticut going into detail about their 12-year-old daughter's response to the episode. "The Walking Dead season 7 premiere has left my daughter and I psychologically traumatized!" the complaint reads. "We are not the overly protective parents although we do monitor what our 12 year old watches, as should all parents [sic]." The complaint goes on to call the Negan sequence "by far the most traumatizing thing I have ever seen in my 44 years of living."

Thankfully the ratings are great this year, right? Well, not exactly.