In America, rich and poor, like partisan and bad driver, are terms we reserve for people besides ourselves. Ask a banker and a burger flipper, and they will both tell you that they're middle-class. So it is too on TV. Once, prime time had populist fun with the differences between rich and poor Americans (The Beverly Hillbillies, Good Times, Dallas). But by the late 1990s, both struggling workers and scheming, zillionaire J.R. types had become fewer, replaced by the characters in middle-class soaps (Dawson's Creek) and the cappuccino-quaffing likes of Frasier, Friends and Will & Grace; we were one nation under...
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