Why Walking Dead Season 9 Episode 10 Earned AMC A Huge Fine
The Walking Dead season 9 episode 10 featured a flashback to the start of the zombie apocalypse, but the scene earned AMC a hefty fine – here’s why.
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AMC was hit with a huge fine a few months after The Walking Dead season 9 episode 10 aired – here’s why. Although its sister show Fear The Walking Dead depicts the start of the zombie apocalypse, this is something The Walking Dead has largely steered clear of. Instead, the AMC show kicked off a couple of months after the dead had risen with Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) waking up from his coma to find a very different world to the one he once knew.
That said, The Walking Dead has featured a few flashbacks to when the proverbial hit the fan. The season 1 finale “TS-19”, for example, flash-backed to Shane (Jon Bernthal) trying to rescue a comatose Rick as the hospital he was in was overrun by walkers. Similarly, the opening scene of the season 2 episode “Chupacabra” showed Shane and Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) stuck in traffic outside Atlanta as the military napalmed the city in an attempt to contain the outbreak.
The Walking Dead season 9 episode 10 offered viewers another glimpse into the onset of the outbreak in the form of a flashback from Lydia (Cassady McClincy). Titled “Omega,” the episode opened with a scene that saw Lydia and her parents Alpha (Samantha Morton) and Frank (Steve Kazee) holed up in a Baltimore shelter at the start of the apocalypse. In the scene, a siren could be heard over an emergency radio broadcast along with a woman’s voice instructing survivors what to do. The emergency siren was presumably included to make the scene feel more authentic, but it ended up costing AMC an arm and a leg.
Six months after AMC aired The Walking Dead season 9 episode 10, the network was hit with a hefty fine to the tune of $104,000 by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for its use of a siren sound similar to the USA’s official Emergency Alert System (EAS). The EAS is used to warn American citizens of a national emergency (such as a zombie apocalypse, but more likely a tornado or similar weather warning) and its use outside of an actual emergency or an authorized test is a big no-no.
The FCC’s reasoning behind the fine is that misuse of the EAS for entertainment purposes can cause confusion (that is, thinking a real emergency is taking place) or “alert fatigue,” which means the public becomes desensitized to alerts and don’t take them seriously. The Walking Dead isn’t the only show that’s been hit with an FCC fine.
Around the same time ABC talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Animal Planet series Lone Star Law also earned fines for using the EAS tone, while CBS was hit with a similar penalty a month later for simulated EAS tones during an episode of Young Sheldon. Considering Jimmy Kimmel Live! earned ABC a $395,000 fine and Young Sheldon earned CBS a $272,000 penalty, the $104,000 AMC paid out for The Walking Dead season 9 episode 10 suggests the network got off relatively lightly.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/walking-dead-season-9-episode-10-ffc-fine-reason/