USA TODAY

Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Negan, Michael Cudlitz as Sgt. Abraham Ford, Danai Gurira as Michonne, Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon, Christian Serratos as Rosita Espinosa, Steven Yeun as Glenn Rhee on 'The Walking Dead.'

It was just another season of The Walking Dead. Sort of.

After a summer of waiting to find out who villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) had killed in the Season 6 finale, fans discovered that two of their favorite characters had met their end in the fall premiere of AMC's hit. And the audience saw every inch of their heads being bashed in by Negan and his barbed wire-covered baseball bat.

Even for the often-violent series, the image of Glenn (Steven Yeun) with half his skull gone and his eye dangling from its socket was shockingly graphic. The episode and several of the ones that followed caused an outcry among many fans on social media. Some claimed they’d never watch the show again. The Parents Television Council decried the episode. Critics lambasted the gore.

Dead isn’t the only show on TV in 2016 that pushed the boundaries, but the now-infamous head-bashing episode brought the conversation about violence on television back to the forefront of pop culture. Popular shows such as HBO’s Game of Thrones and Westworld, and FX’s American Horror Story have violence as a part of their DNA. Streaming services, premium and basic-cable networks aren't bound by FCC regulations for appropriate content, which leaves audiences desensitized. But are viewers still interested in seeing blood and entrails on their screens?

The Walking Dead premiere was enough to turn Donna Dickens, writer for Uproxx, off the show for good. "Human interaction took a back seat to shock value and cheap 'tune in next week' tricks," she says of the episode.

"I have no problem with violence on television, in general, but it has to make sense within the story," she says. " 'Gore porn' for the sake of making the audience nauseated is just not what I’m looking for in my escapism."

Violence in entertainment has been a recurring theme, from the cartoon variety that almost gave South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut an NC-17 rating in 1999 to the beheadings and sexual violence on Thrones. Yet for all the uproar certain scenes can cause, we still see more violence on our screens. In the Dec. 11 finale, just seven episodes after the infamous Negan scene, The Walking Dead finished the first half of its season with a close-up of a disembowelment.

“When lines are pushed, we feel like we're suddenly somewhere new, but we're not really somewhere new,” says Dave Gonzales, critic and host of pop-culture podcast Fighting in the War Room. “This is the same discussion about violence in media that South Park (was) about, and it comes up over and over again. What we might be doing more often in the past year or so is committing realistic violence against characters that we actually like.”

On these shows the violence is often "not as explicit as a lot of slasher films have been,” says Robert Thompson, a professor of pop culture at Syracuse University. But when it's "part of a well-written, serialized drama ... that’s what I think makes it so pornographic.”

"What I think is so astounding is not just the explicitness of the violent images (in current TV shows), but the psychology of the whole thing," he adds.

In an increasingly fragmented TV landscape, violence is, at times, a tool more shows use to lure audiences

"Networks and creators are constantly looking at how their audiences react to major displays of violence and seeing where they can go next to shock them," notes Jill Pantozzi of pop culture news and criticism site, TheNerdyBird.com, citing shows such as Thrones, FX's Sons of Anarchy and even Hannibal, which aired on NBC. "I think the boundaries are being pushed more and more to both what people will accept and what they now expect from shows."

However graphic this violence is getting, it doesn’t seem to be chasing advertisers away from basic cable shows like The Walking Dead.

Despite a recent ratings dip, Walking Dead is TV's most popular shows among young adults, and thus one of the most reliable for advertisers. So the much-hyped return was one of “the Super Bowl(s) of the entertainment programming world,” says Lisa Herdman, senior VP for RPA, a Los Angeles ad agency. She says both advertisers and viewers should know what to expect from the show.

Both “should have been 100% forewarned what (an) episode was going to be about,” she adds, noting that advertisers wouldn't sponsor content they weren't comfortable with. “I don’t think (the violence) goes too far for those who know what they’re going to see.”

But shows can cross lines, even for fans inured to violence.

"I think there comes a breaking point for some viewers with various aspects of their favorite shows, whether that be deaths on Grey's Anatomy, sexual violence on Game of Thrones, or gore and violence on The Walking Dead," says Pantozzi.

Even Morgan was wary of Negan's skull-bashing. "I don’t know if you need to see the closeup gore of it all," he says. "It’s a lot."

Dead director Greg Nicotero says he's sometimes "shocked" by the violence on Thrones, though he's still watching.

The way sexual violence is portrayed is being questioned even by those within the industry. In a recent Variety story, The Exorcist producer Jeremy Slater calls it "a plague on the industry.”

The problem with the current proliferation of violence on TV may not be in quantity, but in the quality. Whether a result of the controversial premiere or not, The Walking Dead has been losing viewers all season, though still outperforming its competition.

While trying to top themselves, "they might forget that shock doesn't always equal quality storytelling, and that's of the utmost importance to fans, not how much blood they'll see in a particular episode," says Pantozzi.

"I'm on the side of realistic violence instead of exaggerated violence. Showing that violence has consequence is important, adds Gonzales. “I'm not sure if the overall ‘rise’ in violence is a real rise or just a proliferation of writers and directors being too lazy to know how to use violence,” other than for cheap thrills.

“I'm tending to lean towards the latter.”

Contributing: Bill Keveney

Jill Pantozzi

Has violence on TV finally gone too far?