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?

Games—sports—are a form of mass entertainment. They differ from the other principal form of mass entertainment, scripted drama, in three ways that help to account for their appeal. They are spontaneous. Unlike in films and theatrical productions, the outcome is not known in advance: No one bets on the outcome of a play or movie. They are authentic: Unlike film stars, athletes really are doing what audiences see them doing. And games are coherent. Unlike so much of life they have a beginning, middle, and end, with a plot line and a conclusion that can be easily understood.