Emmy mainstays like “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Better Call Saul” and “Succession” have all ended their runs, and the newer Emmy parvenus, such as the comedies “Abbott Elementary” and “Jury Duty,” while excellent, harken back to an earlier, mass-market era of television that was dominated by sitcoms and hourlong procedurals.

This sort of audience divide, not between those who love a show and those who hate it but between those who love it in very different ways, has become a familiar schism in the past fifteen years, during the rise of—oh, God, that phrase again—Golden Age television. This is particularly true of the much lauded stream of cable “dark dramas,” whose protagonists shimmer between the repulsive and the magnetic. As anyone who has ever read the comments on a recap can tell you, there has always been a less ambivalent way of regarding an antihero: as a hero

a subset of viewers cheered for Walter White on “Breaking Bad,” growling threats at anyone who nagged him to stop selling meth. In a blog post about that brilliant series, I labelled these viewers “bad fans,” and the responses I got made me feel as if I’d poured a bucket of oil onto a flame war from the parapets of my snobby critical castle. Truthfully, my haters had a point: who wants to hear that they’re watching something wrong?

One of the most engaging aspects in the storytelling of The Last of Us is that, because Joel dictates how you move forward in the game, you’re implicated in his increasingly gray decision-making. On TV, the viewer is primed to be sympathetic toward a main character, so there’s not the same level of friction as experienced by the gamer. Story lines that feel alive as an active participant in the game instead feel hackneyed on television. Watching The Last of Us, I wanted to pick it up and shake it free from its preconceptions about what it has to do in order to be faithful to its source material and what it wants to do in order to be taken seriously as television. As a series, it says nothing new in either case.