Like sugar and, oh – let’s say the most tabloidy and gossipy reality television programs – credit is, for millions, genuinely addictive.

If the networks can get audiences to tolerate pop-up promos by the dozens, maybe they’ll start selling pop-up commercials, too.

The once inviolate frame within which programs or commercials were displayed on television – always separately – has been violated to a pulp. Program content is seen increasingly as a mere backdrop on which ads are posted like billboards on a fence.

In the 500-channel universe, which may, of course, contain many more channels than 500, the fun never stops – fun at such a fever pitch as to sometimes seem threatening, numbing, even agonizing.

Obviously neither ‘American Idol’ nor ‘Dancing With the Stars’ is a variety show in the classic sense, but the way they incorporate elements of drama, comedy and suspense is moderately ingenious.

You don’t hear TV cops griping because they have to enforce some Draconian law that shouldn’t be on the books in the first place, or lamenting vindictive excesses in sentencing. Hollywood, supposedly a frothing cauldron of liberalism, has always been conservative on crime.

No matter how much programming improves, however, media savants tend to see the medium living out numbered days. It’s feared that the Internet will do to TV what TV did to the movies in the 1950s. But instead of panicking, the networks are finding ways to co-opt the Web.

Gimmicks come and go; the cop show seems one genre that will never leave – not as long as people like to sit at home in the suburbs and see what awful things go on in the cities.

Perhaps Western civilization is in a post-decline phase, or maybe the decline is just taking a really long time, like the Roman Empire’s did. The Romans had gladiators and Christian-hungry lions and that sort of thing. We have MTV.

Television’s escapist programming naturally continues to endorse living beyond one’s means as the time-tested American Way and rarely depicts families or individuals wracked by the pressures and miseries that come with excess.