When the midseason premiere of AMC’s Fear The Walking Dead comes to a close Chris Hardwick will return as the host of the popular show Talking Dead. The popular nerd enthusiast was accused of emotional and sexual abuse towards his ex-girlfriend about a month ago. AMC, after launching an investigation into the claims against Hardwick from actress Chloe Dykstra, have decided that they will continue to employ the alleged abuser.
About a month ago, Dykstra shared some awful revelations about a three year relationship she had with an older CEO of his own company involving emotional and sexual abuse in an essay on Medium. While she never actually names her abuser, if you do your research it seems pretty apparent that she is referring to the popular TV and online personality. AMC suspended Hardwick once the news of these allegations had spread.
Now it appears that the network behind such hit series as Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, has brought Hardwick back into the mix after their investigation completed. AMC recently gave statement to CNN regarding their interesting decision to move forward so quickly with Hardwick’s reinstatement, “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. 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.”
A lot of networks are taking a lot of heat for the transgressions of some of their star power. At TCA HBO was questioned about the hiring of Joss Whedon and continuing to work with James Franco following some similar in nature to the accusations laid against Hardwick. HBO shrugged off the Whedon issue stating, “I’m not going to get into Joss Whedon and his marriage and his ex-wife and what went on in their marriage,” and has apparently done less of an investigation then AMC had done with Hardwick into the Franco abuse claims. “When the Franco issue came up, we talked internally, read the L.A. times article, we looked at all the information, talked to David Simon, George Pelecanos, the executive producers and Maggie Gyllenhaal, the actresses and actors on set and we all felt comfortable moving forward with the second season.”
Chris Hardwick will return to the Talking Dead spinoff series on August 12 after the midseason premiere of Fear The Walking Dead and will host Talking Dead when the ninth season of The Walking Dead begins later this fall. Yvette Nicole Brown, who was slated to take over for Hardwick will guest host the premiere of Talking Dead and still host the August 5 special Walking Dead season 9 preview on AMC.