who are ostensibly "middle class" or "working class" living an upper class life style !

You are talking about "Friends"!

i recall an article years ago with a surprisingly long list of such cases, though i don't remember the shows.

whitney is a more recent offender.

Both showed a remarkably realistic portrait of working class lives..

Roseanne in particular fought to make it so, and to this day people trash talk her based on her taking charge of her own damn show. The Conners had their electricity cut, the network had a coronary...
But it was Grace Under Fire. Brett Butler, a very funny performer and I miss her.

Stooges of the elites are actively trying to erase working class history, like LePage in Maine:

"A spokeswoman said Mr. LePage, a Republican, ordered the mural removed after several business officials complained about it and after the governor received an anonymous fax saying it was reminiscent of 'communist North Korea where they use these murals to brainwash the masses.'"

SNIP

Mr. LePage has also ordered that the Labor Department’s seven conference rooms be renamed. One is named after César Chávez, the farmworkers’ leader; one after Rose Schneiderman, a leader of the New York Women’s Trade Union League a century ago; and one after Frances Perkins, who became the nation’s first female labor secretary and is buried in Maine.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/us/24lepage.html

Kitchen Nightmares, Cops, All in the Family, Dirty Jobs, Pawn Stars, Chico and the Man, Sanford and Son, America's Most Wanted, Happy Days,....(500 other shows)

I was a child when Chico and the Sanfords, the Bunkers and Happy Days met their final episodes. The narrative (fictional) shows you list are each on 30 years in the past. Two of them came from Norman Lear, another (Chico) was a direct response to shows Lear was making. In the 1970's.
Kitchen Nightmares is about a multi millionaire star who comes to solve the problems of lesser talents. The owners of Pawn Stars have a job but it pays them vast income, and they are constantly seen buying another amazing classic car and keeping it. They work, sure. But they are owners of a lucrative and long established business. Hardly 'about working people' as those guys are millionaires and it shows in each episode.
Dirty Jobs is most certainly about working people and is in the Studs Terkel tradition. It is also still on the air.
If you have a list of 500, you sure picked a weak list of examples.....I'd say you named one current show that is about working people, one reality show. No narrative shows that are not antique programming from a time that did in fact portray working people more often.

I guess.

Television is aimed at lower and middle class people and it had shows designed to appeal to them from its inception. TV is not accurate in its depiction of working Americans but they are not invisible as my 500 prime examples demonstrate.

They are NOT even CLOSE to being factual similes of reality.

You ARE being brainwashed in many cases, if you watch too much.

But what do I know...

and the servants who are waiting tabes or working in factories, are not on that list. It's all about the middle class - meaning upper middle class, white collar workers. Yep. $210,000 a year - that's middle class. It's in the top 5% of household income, but apparently that is still part of "the middle".

Everyone has a bathroom that is sparkling new, blindingly white, and the size of a living room. People buy not just a card for Father's Day, but a grill and a tool shed and new tools and seven new shirts and a trip to Jamaica.

And I love the psychiatric medication commercials. Just take our pill, and you'll feel like going right back to making pottery in your quaint, fully-equipped pottery studio next to your private garden on the lake!

this morning, with the one host breathlessly exclaiming over and over again, "But, but, but...I just can't BELIEVE that nearly half of the people in this country don't pay any income taxes!!1!", in the context of a discussion over the "debt crisis" ( )...

and another for the revealing intercourse in the thread.