The Walking Dead: parents' guide

Graphic gore: walkers eat people and animals, heads are stabbed and shot, and humans torture, behead and slaughter each other. Sexual violence: a villain forces a woman to strip and menaces her, men try to rape a boy, and captives are sexually exploited off screen.

Frequent unbleeped s-words plus bitch, pissed, damn and hell; f-words are rare to absent. In season 1 a racist character aims a racial slur at a Black survivor.

Most episodes have none, but a few show couples having sex briefly, without explicit nudity, and others imply it off screen. Affairs, pregnancy, birth control and a love triangle come up in the story.

Occasional rather than constant: a drug-dealing survivor is shown using drugs in seasons 1 and 3, an alcoholic farmer relapses, another survivor's craving for liquor sets off a deadly walker attack, and a teenage girl gets drunk on moonshine. Some characters smoke.

Constant tension, jump scares and decaying corpses, with major characters, including children, killed suddenly. A girl kills her younger sister, a boy must shoot his mother's body after she dies in childbirth, and two husbands abuse their families.