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?

to Levinson, emotional realism meant making the internal external. In other words, he wanted to show the extreme highs and lows of adolescence visually, even if those visuals didn’t adhere to a physical realism.

why not give a show that’s not like a realistic portrait of the youth but more like how they portray themselves

most of the time, we’re using primary colors, and I’m relying a lot on the orange-blue color contrast, which is a really basic one… We use that in night scenes, as well as in day scenes.”As the Euphoria cinematographer notes, the orange-blue contrast is a classic use of a complementary color scheme. And it is used in countless films and TV shows. But Rév cranks up the orange-ness and blue-ness of the lights, creating a contrast that goes beyond the reality of a setting.

the lighting is not completely divorced from the physical reality of the situation. The blue is motivated by the moon, the orange by streetlights. But the degree to which he leans into this contrast is what goes beyond reality and into emotional realism.

“Of course, you have party scenes and stuff, [with] basic colors. Sometimes, it’s red; sometimes, it’s blue,” explains the Euphoria cinematographer. “But we try to stick to one defined color, and not be all over the place.”

I would say the camera movement is the glue in the show, that glues it together.

With a few exceptions, the camera seems to float, giving it an ethereal quality matching the show’s mood.“When the camera is moving, it’s always on tracks or on a dolly,” said Levinson. “We do very little handheld camerawork. And probably 70 percent of the show is shot on sets.”These sets are key to the camera movement. Because the sets are built from the ground up, they are often constructed with specific camera maneuvers in mind.

Of course, this level of complexity requires a massive amount of planning, including storyboarding the camera movements.“Marcell and I sat down with Peter Beck, our storyboard artist, and we basically storyboarded the entire episode,” says Levinson. “There were roughly 700 or 800 boards, and then, in conversation with [production director] Michael [Grasley], we built all the sets from those boards.”The shot took a whopping six days to finish, a rarity in television. “Part of the nature of television is that it doesn’t usually allow for a lot of indulgence,” explains Levinson. “On this show, we made the decision in advance not to do a lot of coverage, which is unusual for television. But in deciding to shoot that way, we accepted the fact that we had to really plan the thing out to get it right.”This type of auteur-esque control is what allows Euphoria cinematography to look so striking. It’s a show which has a visual style that few other series have ever matched.

The show should be a celebration, a statement, a home run swing, and its narrative architecture reflects that ambition. Instead, its style is anonymous, ancillary, the work of a corporate author rather than an artistic intelligence.

these scenes in the 1960s and 1970s function as flashbacks, but they are also the best scenes in the show. This is partially because Tseng’s performance is easily the strongest in the series, but it’s also because it’s clear the filmmakers have given these portions of the show a distinctive look and feel to connote them as flashbacks. Vast denuded forests, new construction that already feels like it’s about to rust, the too-bright sun making the very air of cold hallways visible—it’s a tremendously compelling world, raw, sad, even darkly funny.

To some extent, the animations in the game need to feel uncanny. We have to differentiate them from the reality of the show, but we also have to believe that the characters themselves can’t differentiate them from their own realities. It’s a tricky predicament for the show to figure out—what does The Real look like?—but it’s a problem they’ve largely deferred. And the visual blankness, the frictionless animated splendor of the game, seeps into the rest of the series. In the game and out of it, the visual effects on this show—many of which are meant to be literally global spectacles of shock and awe—have the chintzy sheen of the Sci-Fi Channel space operas Moore was writing against in 2003. Sights meant to elicit gasps from our characters look like demo reels from startup VFX companies, at best, and demo reels from defense contractors at worst.

One thing we learn early on about the aliens is that they cannot lie. Because they can’t lie like humans do, they also can neither produce nor understand fiction. They have a complete multidimensional understanding of the universe, but they cannot fancy it otherwise than it is. They demonstrate technical capability but no real imagination. All content, no style.

Networks and streamers want shows to look “good,” but that designation is less about quality or imaginative production design than it is about a set of visual tropes that read to well-trained viewers as “good.”

Think of the Instagram filter aesthetics of Ozark, the dark and oversaturated “Netflix look” of The Sandman, the tinned Fincherisms of A Murder at the End of the World—Peak TV prestige style can be a copy or a caricature of itself, but it’s also a wan reflection of beloved texts of the prior age. Aping the signature look of Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones or True Detective is a way to activate a set of coded cues for viewers to notice and approve. Such a style distracts distractible viewers from the thinness or derivativeness of the show they’re watching. If it didn’t look like that, they wouldn’t care, or worse, they wouldn’t feel that they should care.

Many of the most acclaimed series of the past few years have been distinguished by their singular televisual styles. The Bear’s fast cuts and extreme close-ups sutured to dad rock deep cuts of the mid-aughts; Shogun’s anamorphic lenses and natural light and swirly bokeh—or blur—around the edges; Succession’s nauseating handheld and gray landscapes; I’m a Virgo’s ramshackle practical effects and forced perspective; Euphoria’s loud and hallucinatory “emotional realism.”

3 Body Problem feels allergic to this kind of cohesive televisual vision. There’s so much to do, so many characters to introduce, so much science to condense and explain, so many mysteries to investigate and unveil, so many questions to ask and answers to complicate, so much book to dutifully adapt. In the moments when we notice the show making a visual or a stylistic choice, they tend to be strictly utilitarian: The scenes in Mongolia mark a transition in time, nearly every pop music cue thuddingly references what’s happening onscreen, two eyes merge into one inside the headset when the video game begins, the capillaries in one scientist’s eyeballs seize into a glowing, ticking clock that warps and deranges everything she (and we) sees. Because these scattered touches nearly all denote transitions out of the show’s present or serve to emphasize points or themes within it, that means that the show’s baseline is a kind of deliberate stylelessness, a boilerplate reality.

This show, for all its many fine performances and thoughtful narrative contraptions, feels processed, not created; professionally managed, not imagined.

The scenario the show ultimately posits bears little resemblance to traditional sci-fi fare; the aliens are coming, but not for another four hundred years, putting humanity on notice for an encounter—and possibly a war—that’s many lifetimes away. This time span is as much a curse as a blessing. Forget the science for a second; what kind of political will—totalitarian or otherwise—is required to keep centuries of preparation on track? How do we get the über-rich to contribute to a new space race in a way that also flatters their egos? And what resources does it take to accelerate scientific discovery to a breakneck pace?

But that central conflict between siblings, stemming from being raised as attack dogs always poised to bite each other, never wavered. It's what ultimately lost them Waystar, and what ultimately eroded their souls.

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.