POLITICS is the rich man’s soap opera, without breaks for commercials.

It contains everything — drama, ambition, conspiracy, betrayal, class struggle, generational conflict, hubris, humility, pathos and bathos — all played out by a cast of characters whose cousins can be recognised in the US’s Dallas and Dynasty, the UK’s Downton Abbey, and India’s Uttaran.

Gone are the chocolate-box stereotypes of Dr Kildare with his mellifluous bedside manner (the forerunner of Grey’s Anatomy), or the amateur detective Remington Steele with his rapier-sharp reflexes. Their place has been taken by heroes manqué who no longer fight crime; they practice it. Take the plot of the last episode of Delhi’s Dynasty. With an eye to securing support during the 2014 elections, an ordinance exculpating convicted MPs was approved by the Indian Union Cabinet, submitted hurriedly to the president for approval (which he refused), and then shredded publicly by the Congress vice president before being withdrawn by the same prime minister who proposed it.

The president is Pranab Mukherjee whom Sonia Gandhi denied the prime ministership, just as her late mother-in-law had withheld the same prize from the ‘untouchable’ leader Jagjivan Ram in the 1970s.

The ordinance-shredding Congress vice president is 43-year-old Rahul Gandhi, whom the octogenarian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had anointed before leaving for the US as his chosen successor. Unfazed by this Oedipal revolt, Manmohan Singh returned to Delhi and after meeting Mrs Gandhi and her sharp-tongued son, has been retained as prime minister. It is too early, the Gandhis decided, to write him out of the script.

A politician who could have benefited from the cloak of criminal invisibility extended by the scuttled ordinance would have been the former chief minister of Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav. He has been sentenced to five years in jail for involvement in a fodder scam of huge proportions. In an unusual twist, he has again handed over the sandals of power as the head of his Rashtriya Janta Dal party to his Sita-like wife Rabri Devi, just as he did during an earlier season shown between 1997 and 2005.

Take the US version of Dynasty. An earlier series had the Kennedys. Its sequel had the Bush family. The next one advertised is about the Clintons. Hillary Clinton has already had one shot at the presidency, when she was pipped at the post by Barack Obama. Like Nixon in 1960, she may have lost the battle but she may yet win the war. In case she doesn’t, Bill Clinton has begun to propel their daughter Chelsea upward, fuelled by his well-stocked Clinton Global Initiative.

Had American scriptwriters been asked to conceive a script in which a US president and Capitol Hill would bring their country to a halt for a week, in which the US would teeter like some improvident spendthrift on the brink of default, and in which an African-American housewife with a young child in her car would be riddled with bullets for a traffic violation close to a White House occupied by an African-American president, they would have looked up at the ceiling with incredulity and chewed their pencils in disbelief.

And yet these things have happened, and have been shown on television.

In Pakistan, politics is viewed as an endless soap opera that has retained its audience even after 63 years. Its closest rival for banality would have been Britain’s Coronation Street. The main protagonists tend to remain the same: the Bhuttos, the Sharifs, the Chaudhrys, the army and the judiciary, and more recently, the Zardaris. Their faces change as younger or newer players are tried out in bit roles before being trusted with star roles. It is the unending dramatic interplay between them that keeps their audiences riveted to their screens.

Twenty years from now, historians of this period of our history will wonder how we allowed our own soap opera to run unscripted for so long. They may marvel at how we managed to pack so many traumas into such few episodes. Each week, we show our country at its worst: suicide bombers in our churches and our bazaars, the killing of senior army personnel, murders, abductions, the rape of juveniles, theft on an institutional scale, graft and extortion on a scale that would have embarrassed the Mafia.

Death is not spoken of in whispers or mentioned in euphemisms. Recent American television series such as Bones bordered on the verge of necromania. Their backdrop was not an antiseptic hospital ward but a mortuary. The dead were not covered discreetly by a sheet; they were shown in uncensored images of mock post-mortems.

We have no need for such simulations. We see our dead, live on television, as countless corpses of victims are transported daily in body bags, to the wail of ambulance sirens.

Will there ever be an end to these reruns, this loop of violence? It seems doubtful. Like the US, the various pillars of state responsible for good governance in our country appear intent on accentuating only the differences that divide them, not fulfilling the common national purpose that should unite them.

Television was once described as ‘the first truly democratic culture — the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what people want’. That explains the popularity of soap operas, and politics. It also explains why our politicians prefer to posture on television than perform in parliament. Wasn’t it Noel Coward who said that “television is for appearing on, not looking at”?

The writer is an author and art historian.