The TV show Christopher Walken hates with a passion: “The most pornographic, obscene thing I’ve ever seen”
Like most other actors who found stardom during the ‘New Hollywood’ era, Christopher Walken wasn’t even a semi-regular fixture on television until the 21st century, when the small screen’s latest ‘Golden Age’ saw the biggest stars in the business bring their talents to ongoing shows or limited series.
At the beginning of his career, the Academy Award winner appeared in a handful of recurring episodic favourites, as tended to be the case with any performer seeking to cut his teeth. However, he was completely absent from any fictional series between 1977 and 2003, although he did star in a handful of made-for-TV movies.
Of course, Walken became a fixture on Saturday Night Live, for better or worse. He’s accused Will Ferrell of ruining his life after spending the last quarter of a century being constantly asked for more cowbell, with the sketch becoming the bane of his existence that he’s never been able to shake.
Even when he boarded Apple’s acclaimed Severance, he did so in typically Walken-esque fashion. Because he’s effectively a Luddite who doesn’t own a mobile phone, computer, or send emails, episodes of the dystopian drama that airs exclusively on a streaming service are sent directly to his home on DVD so he can watch them.
That aversion to modern technology doesn’t mean he doesn’t watch TV, but there’s one genre he absolutely cannot stand. If he did subscribe to a streamer or two, he’d be able to avoid it, but scrolling through the innumerable channels of basic cable led him down a path towards the worst thing he’d ever witnessed on television.
“The most pornographic, obscene thing I’ve ever seen is the Hunter’s Channel on cable TV,” he informed the St Louis Dispatch. “These guys take their 10-year-old kids to kill their first deer, and afterwards they sit around giggling like schoolgirls.”
Even though he’s played plenty of crazed, sadistic, violent, and gun-wielding characters in his lifetime, Walken has never fired a real gun away from a film set. He can’t stand the idea of weapons being used to inflict harm on people or animals, so it’s understandable he’d be left so aghast when he stumbled across a show based entirely on parents handing their sprogs firearms and taking great joy in claiming their first kill.
Presumably, he never made the mistake of watching it again, even if there’s no telling what other weird, wild, and gruesome reality TV shows Walken may have encountered during his aimless scrolls through the TV guide to find something worth watching. He doesn’t even watch a lot of his own films, and anything on-demand is beyond his technological capabilities, so maybe he’ll just have to grin and bear it and hope he doesn’t end up accidentally seeing any other gun or hunting-related shows in the future.
