For the past several months, I’ve had a growing obsession. Like all summer flings (or so I’ve been told), it was mystifying, ravishing and awkward. The gal was cable news, and she’s never looked crazier.

Like beach novels and blockbusters, cable news fascinates with a weird artistry that is focused on narrative, not heft. And while I could babble like a schoolgirl about Cooper or King or Coulter ’84, I’ll limit myself here to the veteran performers who hone their craft daily on that most hallowed of stages, Fox News.

Fox News, not unlike its left-leaning counterparts, is less journalistic institution than commedia dell’arte, a merry assortment of stock characters. Its anchors’ viewpoints are predictable and predictably aggravating, and that’s precisely what makes the indulgence so much fun. Whether or not we agree with the network’s politics (and some of my views have recently budged inexplicably rightward, or at least centerward), we watch for the characters. It’s like professional wrestling, only with more scantily-clad blondes. And just who are the heavyweights, the red-meat, red-state virtuosos?

1. Bill O’Reilly, the Papa Bear of traditional values. O’Reilly’s character is an artistic cross between a backcountry father from a Bronte sisters novel and a bellowing Dickensian buffoon. In narrative terms, O’Reilly’s character is weirdly dynamic: He daily morphs from overblown, “No Spin” partisan to paranoid patriot to bashless salesman, hawking hats and doormats and his own books (for charity).

2. Sean Hannity, two parts hollow smugness, one part country music, one part feigned disbelief over stimulus spending. Hannity singlehandedly proves the visceral power of visual media over the written word; never have I so wanted to punch a character from a book in the face. But it’s not just Hannity’s paunchy douchebaggery that turns viewers (even, I suspect, staunch conservatives) from sympathizing with him. The entire narrative structure of Hannity’s America, particularly “The Great American Panel,” pushes viewer sympathy away from the man himself.

Hannity’s panel usually consists of two conservatives and one liberal, at least ostensibly. But the conservatives are seasoned contributors or politicians (or, on occasion, Miss USA contestants), while the Democrat is usually a defected staffer or a blubbering PETA type. Before Hannity’s panel, one feels like the viewer of a corny sports movie — no matter how cloying the hero may be, we can’t help rooting for her, if only because of the opposition stacked against her.

3. Geraldo Rivera. The phrase “quixotic” leaps to mind, and not just because of the Hispanic thing (in that respect, Geraldo’s claim is dubious anyway — he was born in Manhattan, raised Jewish, and called “Gerald” until his mid-twenties). The knight errant and the journalist errant are both hapless, self-styled crusaders with a flair for the melodramatic, and both buckle under the weight of their own reputations. But while the Quijote eventually renounces chivalry, the Moustache seems immune to any embarrassment: He’s been duped by a fake Al Capone vault and thrown out of Iraq for making a sand drawing of his unit’s position, but he’s still going strong as a regular Fox contributor.

4. Glenn Beck. The unchallenged prima donna of cable TV, a tragic figure who just keeps getting tragicker. The medium in which Beck works makes it particularly challenging to sustain his level of weepiness — TV audiences expect a predictable character arc each time they watch a show (Exhibit A: Dr. Cox on “Scrubs,” who goes from hardened veteran doc to puddle of goo in every episode). But Beck’s ability would appear to have something to do with his position as a newsman: Journalists are constantly getting new material, which, in the right hands, means something to weep about every night. But it’s more than that. Since the 2009 healthcare debate began, Beck has stopped covering breaking news stories almost entirely. Over the past few weeks, his material has diverged in one of two directions: the sensational and the self-sustained. In the first instance, Beck proves himself the last best hurler of the scandalous signified — several of Obama’s policies and cabinet members have been called “Socialist,” as if the epithet were both true and incriminating. (A more acrobatic example saw Beck label Barack Obama and Barney Frank, a gay, Jewish Congressman, as Nazis.) In the second, he draws upon a fervent populism that is often given a heart, a mind and a mouthpiece by Fox.

This peculiar relationship between entertainment and public activism is what separates Fox from other networks, and cable news from other sub-artistic forms. It’s escapist and bewildering and beautifully 21st-Century. God help us.