In January, after his first rounds of chemotherapy, I tuned in for episode No. 376, filmed on a visit to the Orinoco oil belt. Chávez looked paler, his face swollen, but was as expansive as ever, announcing that Venezuela would refuse to participate in a World Bank arbitration panel that could award billions to ExxonMobil after Chávez expropriated its assets, and implementing a new social program with the Orwellian name the Great Mission Knowledge and Work. Then he made visits to various oil facilities, and footage of him disembarking to cries of “Viva!” alternated with long shots between stops, taken from inside his jeep, of rain falling on the gray road.

During my first few hours of watching “Aló Presidente,” I felt a mild thrill: the anticipation that the host might make some unexpected move that would affect millions of people. Eventually, though, the show’s relentless sameness began to resemble a different aspect of reality — tedium — and soon I felt as if I were watching the TV equivalent of Andy Warhol’s “Empire.” I’d get up to fetch something to eat, and when I returned, there he was, still filling my screen, smiling, proclaiming, self-satisfied, eternal. A normal show could never get away with this, of course. But when you flip through the channels of a Sunday in Caracas, it’s all “Aló Presidente,” all the time.

But then, the show’s intended audience may be watching with a very different perspective. The historian Enrique Krauze has written that “Aló Presidente” gives Venezuelans “at least the appearance of contact with power, through his verbal and visual presence, which may be welcomed by people who have spent most of their lives being ignored.” While poverty has fallen under Chávez, more than a quarter of the population of Venezuela still lives under the poverty line; inflation last year was second only to Ethiopia’s; the slums of Caracas are more dangerous than Baghdad or Ciudad Juárez. As in most Latin American countries, poverty tracks with race, and leaders tend to be “white,” which is to say of Spanish ancestry. So it would be hard to overstate the pride that Venezuela’s poorest and most marginalized feel in having a black-white-indigenous man as their democratically elected president. But there is no real way of knowing how many people, even among his supporters, follow him on TV.

In one of the more surreal segments, an interviewer stops passers-by on the street in Caracas and asks them whether they watch the show. “Yes, with great frequency,” replies an earnest man in glasses. Why? asks the interviewer. “It’s the best way to inform ourselves, with the most clarity,” he replies. “The president tells us everything, he hides nothing.” One girl says she watches to “absorb our leader’s wise words.” Some of these people chosen apparently at random may in fact be true believers. But if one of them said, “I don’t watch it because I think Chávez is a clown and a tyrant,” the show might take a darker turn. These interviews also mark the moment that “Aló Presidente” finally folds into a house of mirrors: forcing citizens to play the role of engaged viewers while appearing on the show in order to persuade other real-life viewers that the citizens are engaged.

In the end, it doesn’t matter much what these people say when the cameras are rolling; and, of course, the opposite is true of Chávez, whose utterances to the camera matter supremely. Anything he decides or does or says on the show instantly becomes the audience’s reality, in a tangible way, regardless of whether they are watching. In this sense, “Aló Presidente” is unlike anything else on television. A TV show in America, no matter how engaging or successful or artfully put together, is always, in essence, a distraction from life. “Aló Presidente” inverts this formula, at least for Venezuelans. Instead of high entertainment value with no real-life significance, it offers low entertainment value with absolute significance. From the safety of my couch, if I become frustrated or bored or enraged or no longer amused, I can interrupt Chávez midsentence, reach out, just turn him off and he is gone. In his own country, it doesn’t matter if people watch or not. The Chávez show goes on (and on), and it is the exact same thing as real life.