Burma's two state-owned television channels normally offer a bland diet of traditional musical performances, Chinese martial arts dramas, documentaries on local factories and long shots of generals inaugurating dams and bridges. Sensitive events, such as last week's release of democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi, are ignored.
But one station has recently been serving up spicier fare - a Burmese-language soap opera about an affluent business family whose widowed patriarch was infected by HIV during a fling with an attractive young woman.
Produced with help from UN Aids, the 10-part drama is, by staid local standards, sensational. Early scenes depict the patriarch's son spending a drunken night with his girlfriend, then taking her to meet his ailing father. It turns out that she is the one who infected the older man with HIV.
Later, characters discuss how condoms can be used to prevent HIV transmission.
It took nearly two years for Burma's conservative ruling generals to let the series go on air, but aid workers hope it augurs a new, more pragmatic approach towards what is shaping up to be a significant HIV/Aids epidemic.At the same time, western countries are quietly preparing to step up their own support for local Aids prevention efforts, even as they maintain other sanctions against the junta.
"People are dying from Aids and people are getting infected every hour that goes by in the day," says Steven Honeyman, an aid worker who recently spent five years in Burma with PSI, the non-governmental organisation behind the television serial. "If there are things we could do to prevent that, we should be doing them."
A UN official familiar with the epidemic asks: "What will be the point of a political breakthrough if you have a country that could be devastated by an HIV/Aids epidemic? We can't wait. We have to respond."
With huge numbers of migrant workers and busy, porous borders in the opium-producing Golden Triangle, Burma has the makings of an Aids hotspot. Plenty of men spend long months away from home working - and patronising commercial sex workers in their idle time. Many others seek jobs in more affluent Thailand, which has both a booming sex industry and its own serious Aids problem.
Burma's borders with China and India are key points in heroin trafficking routes, with plenty of injecting users along the way. The UN estimates that at least 500,000 of Burma's 50m people have already been infected with the virus.
Until now, though, Burma's junta has largely ignored the long-term threat HIV/Aids poses to the country's future, seduced by their own rhetoric about impeccable national morality. The Aids budget this year is equivalent to just $84,000 (£57,500).
While the national Aids programme sends teams to distribute condoms and information to high-risk populations, their efforts are hampered by lack of resources. The authorities have also banned, on moral grounds, national campaigns to promote condoms.
The involvement of international aid donors has so far been limited, partly due to the regime's attitudes and partly to Ms Suu Kyi's opposition to any aid or investment in Burma until there is political change. Donor funding for Aids programmes last year was less than $3.5m, compared with Thailand where the government and donor countries together have spent $30m-$90m a year over the last 10 years.
But with the Aids toll increasingly visible, attitudes seem to be shifting. A top general last year told a local newspaper that Aids was "a national concern" and the regime recently raised its estimate of national HIV infections to 179,000, up from its previously claimed 30,000.
International donors have sent missions to Burma to study the situation, and the European Union has agreed to provide E5m (£3.4m) to UN and NGO Aids prevention work.
With Ms Suu Kyi now freed from house arrest, aid workers are hoping that more money will follow. Shortly after her release, Ms Suu Kyi hinted that she would alter her stance on humanitarian aid as part of a broader dialogue with authorities, and diplomats have suggested she and her supporters may even work with the regime on a joint committee to supervise humanitarian aid.
"We want what is best for the people of Burma as quickly as possible," Ms Suu Kyi said. "The most important elements are accountability and transparency. Whatever is given to the people should get to them in a right way."