The bad news about the season premiere of “The Walking Dead” on AMC Sunday night was that the survivors who lured the heroes to a so-called sanctuary turned out to be cannibals.

The good news is that they were not elitists.

Dystopian parables like “The Walking Dead,” where zombies rule the earth, are an increasingly fashionable genre of entertainment, but the degree of apocalyptic pessimism is very different depending on the size of the screen.

The dividing line between television and movies seems to be class conflict.

Television shows posit a hideous future with a silver lining; survivors, good or bad, are more or less equals. Movies like “Divergent,” “Snowpiercer” and “Elysium” foresee societal divisions that last into Armageddon and beyond and that define a new, inevitably Orwellian world order that emerges from the ruins of civilization.

The audiences are not different. It’s not as if only socialists eager to see management oppress the worker buy movie tickets to see “Elysium,” while the more democratically minded prefer to stay home and watch “The Leftovers.”