Johannesburg - Gotham is the show with the highest number of murders, new research has revealed.
The study, conducted by leading UK slots and news destination Theslotbuzz.com, found that the US drama series had a whopping 1385 murders across five seasons, with an average of 14 people killed per episode.
Theslotbuzz.com compiled data for 15 of the most popular crime dramas, and tallied the number of murders in each series. It also revealed that Super-villain Bane was the most violent character of all time, with a body count of 336 in the Gotham series.
Meanwhile, the research found that Dexter ranked second, with 920 total murders committed and nearly 10 kills per episode on average. Running for eight seasons since 2006, this popular series features the double life of serial killer Dexter Morgan. It wrapped up after its finale, released last January.
Netflix crime series Ozark is in third place, with 241 murders committed and 5.5 murders per episode, on average. Set around the Lake of the Ozarks, this show started from a money laundering scheme which leads to the relocation of Marty Byrde and his entanglement with local criminals.
In regards to the most violent crime show character of all time, Theslotbuzz.com found out that Eduardo Dorrance, also known as Bane, is named as the most violent crime show character of all time, with 336 murders committed in the Gotham TV series. As the leading member of Delta Force and a super-villain operating in Gotham City, Bane accounts for nearly 25% of all kills in the TV series.
Meanwhile, Arthur Mitchell ranked as the second most violent crime show character, having killed a staggering 279 people in Dexter. Being the main antagonist throughout the four seasons of the series, he accounts for over 30% of all the murders in the show, almost double the 141 people killed by the main character, Dexter Morgan.
Coming in third place is Darlene Snell, with 63 victims on the show Ozark. Although the Mexican drug cartel, the Lagunas cartel, is responsible for an estimated number of 124 murders in the show, Darlene Snell is the person who single-handedly killed the most in this series (26%), including the surprising murder of her husband.
In order to compile the research, Theslotbuzz.com seeded a list of 15 of the most popular TV shows created after trawling through a range of online publications. Only fully completed seasons were counted. Theslotbuzz.com then sourced and counted the number of murders in each show via a list of deaths on a popular fan site and plot summaries on Wikipedia.
The number of episodes for each TV show and the name of the characters were also noted for the breakdown of data. To ensure data consistency, mentions of multiple unspecified murders (eg. "kills several of the men", "many of them were killed") were counted as five deaths. When the number of perpetrators exceeds the victims for a specific case, the number of murders was counted as the number of perpetrators (eg. 2 men kill 1 man -> 2 murders). Deaths by negligence (eg. drunk driving) and resurrections (eg. in the series ”Lucifer”) were counted as murders.
Only named characters' murders were counted. When the hired assassins were unnamed characters, the kill was counted for the person who hired them. In addition, suicides and legitimate kills by police were not counted in this study as they did not incur prison sentences. All prison sentence years are calculated as 15 years per murder, the estimated median sentence length according to multiple sources such as the US Department of Justice and Sentencing council.