I was reflecting on last night’s series finale for Sons of Anarchy, and thinking back on how much over the top violence we saw in that show. And it got me wondering - which TV series had the highest body count of all time? I think SOA has to be in the running. If you want to count zombies, I guess that The Walking Dead would have to be way up there as well…
I’m hard pressed to come up with any show I’ve watched that trumps SOA. I honestly can’t think of an episode that didn’t feature some poor soul meeting a violent end, and there were a bunch of scenes where they killed off 6 or 8 people at a time.
I dunno, maybe Game of Thrones? I never got into that, but I get the sense that it has a pretty high rate of carnage.
The new Battlestar Galactica has got to be up there – it starts with millions (billions?) of people being killed in enormous genocidal terrorist attacks, tallies up thousands of “official” in-universe deaths afterwards, and has quite a few deaths of significant characters throughout the series.
Over the entire run of the series, or on a per-episode average?
On a per-episode basis, 24 has to be a contender, especially after they exploded the nuke outside L.A.
I think the OP should either clarify the question or start a new thread: there are multiple types of body counts–ranging from the SF shows where civilizations are destroyed to shows where there a lot of individuals with speaking parts who are killed individually.
i don’t know if it has THE highest body count, but the 80s medical drama St. Elsewhere was notorious in its first few years as virtually every patient who checked into the hospital died horrifically. A fair number of the doctors and nurses on staff met untimely ends too.
MASH is probably up there; every episode showed scenes of soldiers being triaged and a doctor saying “He’s too far gone…” or something.
If we’re ignoring SF deaths, I’m going to nominate Gunsmoke. It was a western made back in the era when the good guys would shoot and kill a bad guy. (They used to open each week’s episode with a scene of Matt Dillon shooting a villain down in the street.) And Gunsmoke had longevity - it ran for 635 episodes so the body count had decades to add up.
Gunsmoke has to be up there. Only one or two deaths per episode, but with over 600 episodes, it’s probably the biggest body count for any show that portrayed individual deaths.
Since there are lots of TV series that have millions, if not billions of implied deaths, I think it would be more fun to count only on screen deaths where you see either them die or the body of a victim. By that criteria I would guess maybe Law & Order where there is a dead body every episode.
Spartacus did pretty well on a “bad breath range” body count count per episode. It wasn’t a very long series and it didn’t have major cataclysms that were only loosely shown.