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Great counterexamples. Maybe if there's a thread that runs througout it's a British distrust more of the dirty business of politics, contrasted to a larger trust in the permanent bureaucracy; "Diplomacy is about surviving until the next century, politics is about suriving until Friday afternoon." Even when the civil servants in Yes Minister are portrayed as completely cynical, they still seem like a beacon of competence and stability throughout the larger society.
In contrast the American depiction of democracy itself is more optimistic (or at least it was in the early 2000s) but their suspicion of the entrenched bureaucracy is much higher.
To be honest I think the super-competent civil service is itself a mis-reading of Yes, Minister?
Consider, say, from 'The Challenge', where Hacker decides to accompany government projects with failure standards, to increase responsibility. The civil service responds with lines like this:
Likewise as the show went on, I felt the nepotism and incompetence of the civil service came up again?
In 'Jobs for the Boys', the civil service are engaged in propping up a pointless construction project. In 'The Compassionate Society', they make a backroom deal to set up a dodgy union protest in order to protect the jobs of administrators. In 'Doing the Honours' they're shown to be entitled and entirely uninterested in safeguarding public money. In 'A Question of Loyalty' they are indeed shown to be "extravagant, overstaffed, incompetent", and deeply wasteful. In 'Equal Opportunities' they're cartoonishly sexist, and in 'The Skeleton in the Closest', their incompetence (Humphrey: "Well of course I'm not a trained lawyer, or I wouldn't have been in charge of the legal unit!") is seen to have wasted huge amounts of money. In 'The Bed of Nails' they're shown to be thoroughly compromised and controlled by the industries they supposedly regulate, and in 'The Whisky Priest' they are amoral and completely uncaring about being complicit in acts of terrorist violence. In 'A Victory for Democracy' the Foreign Office, despite its protestations of professionalism and long-term thinking, wants to throw a democratic government under the bus for no real benefit (that is, they'll let a Yemeni-backed Marxist revolution occur in exchange for which "the Yemenis will let you keep your airport contract", which they had already - Hacker's alternative solution prevents the revolution, keeps the country a British satellite, including the contract, and incurs minimal cost in either money or lives). In 'One of Us' the civil service is shown to be infiltrated by the Soviets and completely heedless of national security concerns. And so on.
The civil service affects competence, and because they're all confident, dignified old men with posh accents many in the audience seem to buy it, but on my reading of the show the civil service are pretty incompetent.
The fundamental tension in the show, I think, is that politicians like Hacker are good at winning elections (thus worrying about polling numbers, seeking publicity opportunities, etc.), and civil servants like Humphrey are good at expanding the power of the civil service and seeking further privileges for themselves, but neither of them are good at seeking the public interest of the United Kingdom.
It's moderated a little - Hacker's instinct is usually to try to do the right thing at first, and he has to be threatened or bullied into backing down, and Humphrey does sincerely believe that the pseudo-aristocracy of the civil service is a good thing that must be preserved - but when it comes down to it, neither group are particularly competent in a meritocratic sense. Politicians try to stay in power. Civil servants try to maintain the privileges of the club. That's it.
Honestly you may well be right - it sounds like you’ve see much more of the show than I have!
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