"Lucille" Will Trump Both "Trump" and "Clinton" as Scariest Name of the Season

How it must distress executives at every network -- not to mention countless showrunners -- when they realize that despite all of their efforts to produce top quality programming that will become popular and remain popular that a show about carnivorous dead people and survivalist lunatics menacing rag-tag bands of "normal" survivors continues to out-rate all else on television among the young demographic groups that matter the most.

It seems nothing can stop this show. And now it has on its canvas the most talked-about character in any scripted series at this moment.  And that "character" is a piece of wood.

If there was a cliffhanger in all of television that mattered last season it was the bone-chilling site of Negan clutching Lucille, standing in front of almost all of the characters from Walking Dead lined up on their knees before him, waiting for him to choose one of them to bludgeon to death. In the Walking Dead comic book series on which the show is based, the character that met this particularly violent death was Glenn Rhee (played by Steven Yeun), but he now seems too obvious a choice, because the show last season played with a fake-death storyline involving Glenn that infuriated and galvanized fans. If Glenn dies now ... well, we won't really care as much as we would have a year ago, will we?

One would think the brutal ultra-violence of the Lucille scenario would be a turn-off. After all, a character we all know is going to have his or her head bashed to bits via a baseball bat covered with barbed wire, and knowing this show we are going to see it happen, or at least be treated to a close-up of the mushy aftermath. But that's not the way we play -- not at a time when families lovingly gather together to binge-watch HBO's blood-drenched Game of Thronesand the many bone-crunching Marvel series on Netflix. AMC knows this, as evidenced by the launch on Friday of a weekend publicity stunt in partnership with Facebook on behalf of Walking Dead in which people can sign in (via their Facebook accounts) to a Web site titled MeetLucille and insert an image of themselves into the lineup of terrified unfortunates waiting to feel the full force of Negan wrath.

That's not for me ... I'm not even sure that I'm ready to watch it, let alone immerse myself into it in any fashion. But I'm sure hundreds of thousands of fans are already busily imagining what it would be like to be at Negan's mercy. Perhaps that's a good way to prepare for the outcome of the election!

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