I really want to know who the hell decided it was a good idea to have a show on right after The Walking Dead where an empty suit is super enthusiastic about the episode of The Walking Dead you just watched. It’s just an okay show, I don’t know why anyone would want to tune in for Nickelodeon-host level enthusiasm about it. And the person whom AMC chose to bring that to you was Chris Hardwick, a guy who is married to a supermodel heiress and still builds his brand on being a nerd.
Despite the fact the Chris Hardwick is so phony JD Salinger probably has an unpublished manuscript about him in his attic, Deadline is reporting that AMC has decided not to fire Hardwick after the allegations of abuse by his ex-girlfriend Chloe Dykstra, and Hardwick will return to Talking Dead when The Walking Dead returns, though Yvette Nicole Brown will be the host of the preview episode on August 5th.
“Following a comprehensive assessment by AMC, working with Ivy Kagan Bierman of the firm Loeb & Loeb, who has considerable experience in this area, Chris Hardwick will return to AMC as the host of Talking Dead and Talking with Chris Hardwick,” the cabler said in a statement Wednesday. “We take these matters very seriously and given the information available to us after a very careful review, including interviews with numerous individuals, we believe returning Chris to work is the appropriate step.”
I don’t know what the rules are anymore. A tweet from ten years ago jokingly saying a fellow Troma employee is a pedophile means you get fired from the biggest movie franchise in history, while being accused of years of abuse by an ex-girlfriend means you have to miss Comic-Con.
I suppose the bottom line here is that Hardwick didn’t do anything illegal, so even with perfect information everyone is going to have a different opinion of if he was abusive or just an asshole. But if it was me, I would have just used it as an excuse to cut Hardwick loose and maybe hire a host with an actual personality like Yvette Nicole Brown.