Survey Says: "Spartacus: Vengeance" and "Game of Thrones" the Deadliest Shows

According to a recent study that counted bodies in top TV shows, there's plenty of death in popular culture and very few funerals.

The body count study was conceived by Funeralwise's managing partner, Rick Paskin, after he noticed the large number of killings occurring weekly on a popular television crime show. Seeking to better understand the public's acceptance of death as entertainment, he decided to commission the study. A network of "watchers" was assigned to count the number of dead bodies in 40 separate primetime programs on both broadcast and cable networks.

"We did not find a direct correlation between the body count and viewership, but these programs are definitely popular with the viewing audience," Paskin said. "As a funeral resource, the role of death in modern society is an interesting subject to Funeralwise. We know how difficult it is to get people to proactively plan for their funeral. There is a clear disconnect between the acceptance of death in popular culture and the acceptance of it in reality."

Other key findings included:

• The deadliest broadcast network show was The CW's "Nikita," with nine dead bodies per episode. The CBS series "NCIS: Los Angeles" was second deadliest, with an average of six dead bodies per episode.
• CBS was the deadliest network, with 11 shows selected for the study, by far the most of any network. Five (5) CBS shows were among the top 10 deadliest.
• Deadliest shows for non-human creatures were The CW's "The Vampire Diaries," with 18 dead vampires per episode, and AMC's "The Walking Dead," with 16 dead zombies per episode.
• The "safest" shows for humans and other creatures were ABC's "Revenge," TNT's "Leverage" and USA's "White Collar," all of which had no dead bodies in the eight episodes analyzed.
• Very few funerals were shown during the programs analyzed.

The body count study was conducted during the first four months of 2012 and included eight recently aired episodes of each series selected for analysis. Funeralwise emphasized that the study was not statistically based. The shows selected for the study were judged to have content that regularly included the presence of dead bodies. Accordingly, the number of shows in the study varied from network to network.

A full report of the study results is available on the Funeralwise.com website.

Posted May 29