TVWW managing editor Diane Werts has beaten me to the punch on this one, reporting on the amazing audience estimates for Sunday's Season 2 premiere of AMC's The Walking Dead in her For Better or Werts column HERE. But those numbers, like the show, bears repeating. They really are shocking -- and multiplying about as quickly as a zombie epidemic...

The second-season premiere episode alone, televised in its regular Sunday night time slot in expanded 90-minute form, drew 7.3 million overall, which is 2 million more than the figure for the Season 1 premiere -- which, on its own, outdid any telecast of AMC's more established and acclaimed series, Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

Take the mammoth-for-cable numbers of the Season 2 premiere, and add in the network's same-night repeats, at 10:30 a.m. and again at 12:30 a.m. -- and then stand back and marvel. When you do that, the overall same-night audience for The Walking Dead, in its second-season launch, is a cumulative 11 million viewers.

In the Nielsen ratings for the week ending Oct. 9, which also tallies live plus same-day viewing into its numbers, that would have put AMC's The Walking Dead right above CBS's Survivor: South Pacific, which drew 10.7 million viewers, and one notch below the same network's Hawaii Five-0, which had just over 11 million viewers and was ranked 23d for the week.

In other words, the overall audience for Walking Dead nearly qualifies it as a Top 20 show -- competing directly against series on broadcast TV. But look at the demos, and it's even more astounding.

Looking solely at the 7.3 million watching the show's time-period Season 2 premiere, 4.8 million of those were in the highly valued demographic category of ages 18-49.

How good is that? This good:

For the week ending Oct. 9, on all of broadcast TV, only four shows scored higher in that demo. Two of those shows were devoted to NBC's Sunday football coverage (the game had 8.9 million viewers in that category, the pregame show 6.2 million) , and the other two were sitcoms. CBS's Two and a Half Men drew 6.2 million in the 18-49 demo, and ABC's Modern Family drew 5.7.

And then came The Walking Dead, at 4.8.

Over at AMC, it's definitely time to throw a Zombie Jamboree. And given the way the Season 2 opener ended, I expect every one of those millions of viewers to return, eagerly, for episode two.

Oh, and by the way: I've seen episode two, and it's even better...