'The Walking Dead' Latest Season 5 Episode Beats NFL Sunday Night Football in Ratings

It's no secret that The Walking Dead is a ratings juggernaut, and AMC's zombie series has even managed to topple the might NFL and its Sunday Night Football broadcast. The latest episode, "Slabtown," did it for the second time this season.

The fourth episode of Season 5 amassed 14.5 million viewers and a whopping 7.6 rating in the key adults 18 to 49 demographic, according to EW.com. Sunday Night Football, typically the highest-rated show on broadcast television, hauled in 17 million viewers and a 6.1 demo rating.

As for the rest of Season 5, series creator Robert Kirkman claimed in a recent interview that the current Season 5, which got off to a fast start, will stick very closely to the source material.

"It's what we've been doing with The Walking Dead comic from day one," he told IGN. "You've made people love and know and identify with these characters -- and then you kill them. Those deaths don't matter if you're not invested in the characters. Season 5 is, more than any other season, following the comics very closely. There's more comic book moments being adapted than there have been in any previous season, so there's a lot of cool stuff for the comic fans coming up and a lot of stuff they will recognize, but of course we'll be doing some stuff in different ways...There are a lot of cool key moments that come directly from the comics."

We've seen such moments already in Season 5, such as the "tainted meat" scene and the slaughtering of the Hunters. But the overarching mission to get to Washington, D.C. is another key plot point on which this season focuses.

"The biggest thing for Season 5 is that the story completely changes...There's a mission to this season -- this mission of getting to Washington and if there's a cure there and if there's infrastructure there and security there," Kirkman said. "What is it that is actually in Washington? I think that having our characters suddenly be driven with a goal that they can actually accomplish is changing how we tell stories in a big way. The episodes of this season are going to feel a bit different than how the show's felt before."

Are you surprised The Walking Dead beat Sunday Night Football? Let us know in the comments section.