A Fox News anchor, a high-profile Donald Trump supporter and a doomed “Walking Dead” character had viewers talking passionately on social media over the past week.
The Wrap has partnered with Canvs, a language analytics company that measures emotions around content, for a weekly look at the characters and personalities that have TV viewers the most worked up. The data below covers Oct. 19-25 and is drawn from the most emotionally reacted-to broadcast and cable television shows. Once again, for the purposes of this analysis we excluded presidential debate-related tweets.
Of the 32,150 Emotional Reactions (ERs) surrounding Tuesday’s episode of “The Kelly File” on Fox News, 80 percent were prompted by host Megyn Kelly, who made headlines of her own thanks to her particularly tense interview with former Speaker of the House and Donald Trump supporter Newt Gingrich. (If there were other segments on “The Kelly File” last night, nobody remembers what they were.)
Things were arguably even more tense on Twitter, where a highly partisan debate broke out between Kelly supporters and Gingrich supporters — plus Trump supporters who backed Gingrich’s testy responses to Kelly. Notably, many of the tweets reacting to the Kelly-Gingrich face-off only mentioned Kelly (“Newt” was mentioned in ERs 15.1 percent of the time, “Gingrich” 2.3 percent of the time) — and featured sometimes harsh personal attacks on her.
https://twitter.com/BulldawgJones/status/791090202844495872
@megynkelly Your entire show is a hit job on Trump! Americans are tired of the bias media! #MAGA
— Deplorable Seamoore (@Seamoore4515) October 26, 2016
@megynkelly awesome Megyn. Newt is a clown
— Michael Benvenuto (@MikeNuto) October 26, 2016
https://twitter.com/hitman52/status/791094728167137282
@megynkelly Well done Megyn… standing up to a bully.
— Jonathon Aslay (@JonathonAslay) October 26, 2016
https://twitter.com/dwh112655/status/791093417036087297
Of the 577,551 ERs surrounding the Season 7 premiere of AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” nine percent mentioned the character Glenn Rhee (played by actor Steven Yeun). Normally we try to avoid spoilers, but there’s really no way to talk about “TWD” without mentioning one particular Glenn-related thing that happened.
Partial spoiler: Something BAD happened to Glenn.
Full spoiler: Read on …
Crying bawling sobbing because Glenn #TWD
— the 5th loko (@slovakat) October 24, 2016
https://twitter.com/BitchyFanGirl18/status/790371917278617601
How dare you @WalkingDead_AMC ? You must pay my therapy after this episode, Glenn's death was unfair.
— I love Rick Grimes ❀ (@RichonneSlay_) October 24, 2016
https://twitter.com/RealKingPierre/status/790381681005867008
i can't stop thinking about glenn and now i'm crying again
— morgie (@Iuvmo) October 24, 2016