Sunday night’s midseason finale of “The Walking Dead” snared 12.1 million viewers on AMC.
While those are big numbers for a cable show, it’s a far cry from the record 16.1 million viewers who tuned in to the zombie apocalypse drama’s Season 4 premiere in October.
Still, Sunday night’s episode — which featured several violent, bloody deaths (including the Governor, pierced with a sword) — was up from last season’s midseason finale and was competing with Sunday-night football on NBC, which always makes a dent in the competition.
Sunday night’s “Walking Dead” episode was also the night’s #1 show on Twitter, generating nearly 881,000 tweets (peaking at 9:48 p.m. with nearly 32,000 tweets-per-minute), according to AMC.
Its aftershow, “The Talking Dead,” pulled in a record 6 million viewers at 10 p.m. with host Chris Hardwick.
For the first half of Season 4, representing eight episodes, “The Walking Dead” averaged 13 million viewers, up 29 percent from the first half of Season 3.
The series returns for the second half of Season 4 on Sunday, Feb. 9.