Zombie apocalypse opus The Walking Dead returns to television tonight as it starts its third season at 9 pm Eastern on the AMC cable network. AMC has a strong Sunday evening franchise alternating among this series and the equally acclaimed Breaking Bad and Mad Men among other fare.

The Walking Dead, based on a series of graphic novels, follows a small group of survivors who are led by Georgia Sheriff Rick Grimes (British actor Andrew Lincoln) and who try to find a safe haven far away from the menacing zombie-cannibal “walkers.”

Last season ended with the unexpected death of two main characters, Dale and Shane; an all-out zombie attack on the farm; and the big reveal of a prison that may or may not provide sanctuary. Season three apparently will also contain new characters and many plot twists. Like Breaking Bad, the new season of The Walking Dead will also be split into two parts; the second grouping of eight episodes of The Walking Dead will air in the spring of 2013.

The highly entertaining, highly rated television show does, however, at times get bogged down into soap opera at the expense of action. Or, as someone once wrote on the internet, the episodes could be improved by “less chat and more splat.”

You’ll also notice that the characters on The Walking Dead often do stupid and/or irrational things. Given that people under intense stress sometimes behave erratically, perhaps in an odd way this injects a note of realism into the show.

A question raised by The Walking Dead (and other zombie movies and TV shows for that matter) is, if the walkers are always so ravenously hungry for human flesh, wouldn’t they become more and more lethargic rather than aggressive and then (hopefully) waste away when they couldn’t find any uninfected person to attack?

Also, given all the hand-to-hand combat (in between long sequences of exposition) in The Walking Dead, wouldn’t the characters risk serious infection when they wind up covered in zombie blood and guts?

Thanks to the DVR, viewers can fast forward through the dull — or gruesome — sequences, respectively, of The Walking Dead depending on their preferences.

The videos below provide a sneak peak of tonight’s first episode as well as season three of The Walking Dead generally:

‘The Walking Dead’ Season 3 Premieres Tonight On AMC [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr