Hordes of mindless zombies will continue to dominate Sunday evenings in the future as AMC's TV adaptation of the hit comic book series, The Walking Dead, has been renewed for a 13-episode second season.

This move comes as little surprise after the Walking Dead pilot earned high ratings this past Halloween night and was a critical hit with viewers across the board (check out Screen Rant's own Walking Dead pilot review).

Some 4.7 million viewers tuned in to watch the second episode of The Walking Dead, including 3.3 million members of the 18-49 demographic. The show's premiere episode drew in 5.3 million viewers (a record for an AMC TV program) and close to 3.6 million from the 18-49 group, which demonstrates that Walking Dead is playing well with young to middle-aged adults in particular. These numbers don't even include the millions that are using DVR to record the show and watching it later or those that purchased the first two Walking Dead episodes via iTunes.

AMC President Charlie Collier is certainly pleased with the Walking Dead results, as he pointed out in an official press release that "no other cable series has ever attracted as many Adults 18-49 as 'The Walking Dead', [which] reaffirms viewers' hunger for premium television on basic cable."

The Walking Dead Season Finale Reviews Discussions TS-19 AMC

Both Robert Kirkman's original Walking Dead graphic novels and Frank Darabont's TV adaptation follow a group of survivors, led by former Sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), as they struggle to live in the wake of a devastating zompocalypse. The franchise mixes gruesome violence against the undead with personal drama as the characters make life-changing decisions and sometimes present a greater threat to one another than that of the flesh-eating zombies now roaming the Earth.

AMC already had two popular critical hits (Breaking Bad and Mad Men) prior to the premiere of The Walking Dead - needless to say, the channel where story matters is certainly doing more than all right by itself.

Catch The Walking Dead Sundays @ 10/9c on AMC.