The conceit of Fox’s “Joe Millionaire,” as anybody reading this now knows, is that the women competing for the affections and assets of man-toy Evan Marriott are under the misapprehension that he is the heir to a $50 million fortune, and not, as is the case, a $19,000-a-year construction worker. This fact will be revealed to the lucky winner at the end, when the “real” point of the show will be revealed: Is she in it for love or money?

Class-vaulting as a simple, fluid and relatively painless upward motion (much like a Tae Bo beginner’s box-kick) is a cherished American fantasy. All one has to do, the story goes (and goes and goes and goes), is meet a hot and kindly member of the wealthy, privileged, educated elite who is not only unconcerned with wealth, privilege and rank but longs to “keep it real” by marrying into the middle or working class. Rich American princes don’t care about social standing. (They’ve had enough with “snooty” types! They are up to here with “snooty!” All they want is a nice, simple, honest girl who loves them for them.)

But, as James’ article points out, this story has no basis in today’s social and economic realities. Or, to put it another way, it’s a crock. As fantasies go, a working-class woman is about as likely to marry into the American aristocracy as she is to win the Lotto. Which is why, although “Joe Millionaire” sounds good on paper, like just the thing to blow the lid off shows like “The Bachelor” (OK, maybe “blow” and “lid” are too strong in this context, unless a gentle exhalation is meant by “blow” and the “lid” is a Kleenex), it doesn’t work in the way it was intended.

It does, however, reveal a lot about what the nonrich have “learned” about the rich from watching TV. The TV rich are just like you and me — only they have funny servants performing 19th century functions and wear tiaras and gowns. They do not, unless they are villains, place any value on their breeding, their education or their pedigrees. They marry only for love.

But the ultrarich — and in particular the idle rich — are different. (In one scene, Evan presents some of the girls with sapphire necklaces. “Have you ever had a sapphire before?” one of them asks another. If the difference between his imaginary status and theirs shifted and both the bogus prince and the humble Cinderellas went down a notch on the class ladder, they might ask each other, “Have you ever had a hot meal? Have you ever had shoes? Have you ever had all of your own teeth?”)

But, of course, this is not the French Revolution show. There’s only so much social inequity the viewing public can stomach, even if it is fake. When Marriott’s shocking net worth is revealed to the unsuspecting maiden at the end of the show, it’s unlikely that even the greediest contestant will admit to losing interest in him. But that’s because a reluctance to admit that one marries for social position is a distinctly middle-class value. (Socialite Patricia Duff, famous for her alimony battles with her billionaire ex-husband Ron Perelman, would probably display no such compunction.)

The truly interesting thing about “Joe Millionaire” is the picture it paints of American middle- and working-class ideas about how the idle rich live. Watching the “millionaire” test his future wife’s “character” by making the girls shovel coal into a steam engine and pick grapes in the freezing rain, I started wishing for a show in which the same girls vied for the assets of an actual scion. Imagine the tests he could subject her to! Can she shop at Barney’s without being sneered at by salesgirls? Can she mistreat the help? Can she withstand the scorn of his friends and mother? How does she do in rehab? But “Joe Millionaire” floats along in a kind of Robin Leach-inspired fantasy, because both the heir and the gold diggers are blissfully unaware of just how exposed their bare classes are.

What kind of hot-blooded, messed-up American heir would hole up in a French château with an assortment of tarted-up office managers who lie about their ages, anyway? Where’s the house in Ibiza? Where’s the party? Where’s the wounding ignorance of how the other 90 percent live? Where’s the blithe sense of entitlement? Where, for the love of God, are the drugs?

That Trista’s suitors arrived on-set with crushes firmly in place adds to the credibility factor, which is not to say that the boys aren’t, you know, nuts (one aspiring groom turned down a contract to play professional basketball in Germany for the “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to be chosen by Trista). But at least they appear to be nuts in the old-fashioned sense: obsessive, delusional, given to flights of imagination tinged with undercurrents of barely suppressed rage at the mere thought of being rejected. After all, they’ve been watching Trista. And they’ve been waiting. And they’ve been telling their friends — while watching her get rejected by Michel in favor of the slightly less inhibited and considerably more pneumatic Amanda Mash — “I’m going to date that girl someday.”

Could it happen in the real world? No. But it could happen on “The Real World,” or some genetic variant thereof. And anyway, “You can meet a husband through any process,” Trista murmurs sweetly to the show’s host when he asks her if she finds the situation in any way strange. Plus, this particular process fits nicely with the age-old maternal exhortation to “shop around” before settling down. Our bachelorette is now strolling around the man supermarket, a one-stop shop stocked exclusively with Trista-approved merchandise.

You almost get the sense the network is trying to make it up to her. “We’re hoping that you find the man of your dreams,” host Chris Harrison assures her during an introductory heart-to-heart talk. “And to that end, we have selected 25 fantastic men with your specific tastes in mind. You’re going to meet all kinds of guys. We have a couple of pilots, several firemen, a few pro athletes — including a bull rider! — and even a breast-implant salesman.”

“Really?” Trista intones with a saucy smile. A breast-implant salesman! O brave new world that has such people in it!

The role-reversing concept of “The Bachelorette” had its share of detractors when it was first announced. But seeing Trista in the driver’s seat (of a bumper car on a closed course, sure, but at least she gets to turn the steering wheel) it’s impossible not to bask in her Fahrvergnügen. Unlike on “The Bachelor,” in which two dozen self-centered beauties were removed from their natural habitats and placed in a holding tank with a bevy of other “popular girls,” Trista is free to sit back, relax and bat her eyelashes. As an added bonus, this bachelorette gets to shed tears of pity and compassion — not humiliation and despair — as she ruthlessly eliminates her suitors for not measuring up to her ideal.

After watching the girls line up for the chance to win the hardened little heart nuggets of an Ivy League MBA, a banker and a would-be millionaire developer on “The Bachelor,” “The Bachelor II” and “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?” it’s nice to see a woman whose romantic dreams have remained unsullied by adulthood. As Fox has perversely and brilliantly set out to prove, meanwhile, those who look for love in televised places aren’t looking, exactly, for love. On “Joe Millionaire,” one girl will outclaw, outscratch, outbitch the competition for a chance at Evan Marriott, a $19,000-a-year construction worker and former underwear model who has been sold to the aspiring future dowagers as the hot heir to a $50 million fortune. Only after Evan has selected a mate will she be told the truth about his tax returns. Will love survive?

Trista’s earnestness and apparent lack of guile actually add to the viewing experience. She likes firemen. They ride around in big red trucks. You might see why creator Mike Fleiss was, as he recently told Newsweek, “sort of dragging my feet on this one … but the network wanted to silence some of our feminist critics, and rightfully so … It’s much better than I thought it was going to be.” Actually, the new format seems to have restored television mating to the natural order of things — the natural order being, of course, high school.

The WB’s “High School Reunion” gets this, and gets that nothing forges future sexual hang-ups and romantic dysfunction like high school. “High School Reunion” takes a selection of classmates from Oak Park (Ill.) High School’s class of 1992 and offers, in lieu of punch, streamers and thinly disguised pissing contests, two weeks of psychosexual torture in a mansion on scenic Maui.

“High School Reunion” is reminiscent of the first “Temptation Island,” in which a paradisiacal setting provided the backdrop for extreme psychological torment. Each member of the class is identified by their high school persona, distilled to its barest, most visceral essence. Among them are the Popular Girl, the Player, the Bully, the Nerd, the Flirt and the Misfit. As you may have already surmised, the Nerd has nursed a 10-year crush on the Popular Girl, and the Tall Girl seems to have developed a borderline-psychotic fixation on the Player. In fact, Oak Park’s Class of ’92 seems to have had a particularly hard time letting go.

The Tall Girl, in particular, seems entirely convinced that the object of her obsession will propose to her before the second week is out. The potential for damage is higher than ever. And as we are learning, damage is what it’s all about. For regular people (or, at least, for people as regular as reality-show participants can ever be), the hurt still seems to come as a surprise, as a recent spate of lawsuits filed against reality shows has demonstrated.

There are those among us, though, for whom humiliation is a way of life. And who speaks for the has-beens?

Well, the WB does. The show is called “The Surreal Life,” and it gives people who will never reclaim their glory days (or day), and yet will never enjoy the comforts of anonymity again, the chance to move in together for an experiment in on-camera living.

What does it take to go on “The Surreal Life”? The first and most painful step is admitting you’re a has-been. 1980s teen idol turned rehab habitué Corey Feldman, early ’90s rap star turned laughingstock bankruptcy case MC Hammer, tragic child star turned tragic has-been child star Emmanuel Lewis, and Vince Neil from Mötley Crüe bunk together (literally, bunk — there are bunk beds in three bedrooms for the seven inhabitants to share) in Glen Campbell’s former residence, which is going for Warhol-cool, but ends up at Chuck E. Cheese. As the tag line goes, “When the rich and famous fall from sight, this is where they’ll crash.”

Perhaps the saddest member of the cast — not quite famous-for-no-reason, but just missing tragic fallen icon status — is former “Beverly Hills 90210″ cast member Gabrielle Carteris, who admits rather sheepishly that not a lot of people remember she was on “90210″ and mentions her husband and two kids no fewer than three times in the first five minutes. But compared to the has-beens, the never-weres have it easy. Sharing digs with Hammer, et al., are Jerri from “Survivor” and Playboy model-turned-”Baywatch” babe Brande Roderick. Hardly a vertiginous tumble between them.

The first episode, which premiered Sunday and was repeated Thursday night, is rife with heart-tugging moments. Feldman calls his fiancée to ask if she’ll marry him on the show, to which she hesitantly agrees, and which the other inhabitants find troubling. Corey’s emotional stability, which he vouches for repeatedly at the start of the show, is perhaps not the unshakable bedrock he claims it is.

In another scene, the guests are treated to a sushi dinner, attractively laid out on the body of a naked girl who must lie very still on a table. It’s a rare surprising moment for any reality show. Three of the men — Hammer, Lewis and Feldman — leave the table in a huff. For reasons ranging from Christianity to vegetarianism to monogamy (Feldman will not eat sushi off the body of a naked girl unless his fiancée is present) the three wind up going inside and ordering a pizza. Gabrielle Carteris tucks in to the toro with gusto and a somewhat glazed expression.

What sets “The Surreal Life” apart from “The Real World” and “Big Brother,” its spiritual precursors, is that the title doesn’t describe the temporary living arrangement and contrived situation so much as it nails the inhabitants’ entire post-fame existence. And it’s something. The word I am searching for, I believe, is “bathos.”

“Lance Loud! A Death in an American Family,” airs Monday night at 9 p.m. on PBS, and chronicles (at his behest) the last days of the first reality TV star. Loud died in a Los Angeles hospice in 2001, at the age of 50, of liver failure brought on by hepatitis C and HIV infection. “I want you there when they wheel me out,” the most notorious member of the Loud family tells the filmmakers at the start of the film. “I can’t leave the planet without some closure from the series.”

The series in question, for those of you too young or attention-span-impaired to remember, was “An American Family,” which hit the air in 1973 like a saucy slap. It was a 12-hour distillation of the months Raymond and her husband, Alan, spent living in the home of one affluent Southern California family. The eldest son, 20-year-old Lance (who was also the first openly gay character on television), became famous for his willingness to flaunt his sexuality and his nonconformity at every opportunity. His exhibitionism worried even the Raymonds, who would occasionally take him aside during the filming and admonish him to think about how he would be perceived by the public.

It’s hard to imagine anthropologist Margaret Mead, who declared “An American Family” to be as “new and significant as the invention of drama or the novel — a new way in which people can learn to look at life” (“Margaret was great,” Lance quipped at the time. “I had to sleep with her to get that quote”), warning teenage Samoans in a similar fashion. (“Now, dear, you don’t want the whole Western world thinking you’re a slut, now do you?”)

“An American Family” was savaged by critics, who one might think would have been happy for the reprieve from “Leave it to Beaver,” “Father Knows Best”-style depictions of American middle-class family life. But no. Establishing a cherished tradition that flourishes to this day, they reserved their harshest judgments for the show’s subjects. Lance received the lion’s share of the opprobrium for opening up his personal life for millions of eager viewers. During the making of the film (or possibly as a result of it), Pat and Bill Loud’s marriage disintegrated and Lance, buoyed by the encouragement of Andy Warhol himself, fled the suburbs for New York to pursue a hazy dream of stardom.

Thirty years later, “Lance Loud! A Death in An American Family” feels like it’s trying to gauge how much damage the series inflicted on the Loud family, and whether it played a part in shaping Lance’s difficult adult years. Ultimately, his freebie fame obscured Lance’s own, self-driven efforts; but you get the sense he would have made those efforts anyway — possibly with even less felicitous results — had the Raymonds never come along. After the series ended, he fronted a cult punk band called the Mumps for seven years, but never got a record contract. He buffered his disappointment with a “Behind the Music”-style 20-year drug addiction while working as a journalist.

Lance was handed an audience of 10 million people, but the role he played in the series and in his life was his own fluent and ephemeral creation. He was, as he put it then, “dedicatedly stupid” and cheerfully unapologetic about it. For a young kid described as an “affluent zombie” by one critic and as a “Goya-esque emotional dwarf” and an “evil flower” by another, he handled attacks with remarkable urbanity and aplomb. As he quipped to Dick Cavett after reading that particular assessment of his character, “That was the one that really hurt. But I took two aspirin and it went away.”

“Lance Loud!” can’t seem to work out whether “An American Family” did Lance a favor or did him in. (Neither, for that matter, could Lance.) But watching old footage of him as a young man, intercut with scenes from the end of his life, you get the feeling he was going in that direction anyhow. As he says, the Louds were “headed for destruction” all on their own. The Raymonds just gave them a lift.

Even before the filmmakers came along, Lance was nurturing the kinds of dreams and inchoate artistic aspirations that come with side effects. They seem to have been offset somewhat by his exuberance and humor (“I’m still big,” a gaunt, weak, toothless Lance jokes at the beginning of the film. “It’s documentaries that got small!”) and a relationship with his family that bordered on the Walton-esque. (Lance’s dying wish was to see his parents reunited, and they honored his request.)

Watching Pat Loud cuddle her dying 50-year-old son, you might wonder if maybe the Louds aren’t a lot like the Cleavers after all, and whether the Raymonds are public television’s answer to Jerry Springer. In any case, Susan Raymond’s warning cuts both ways. Or, it doesn’t cut at all, and merely crackles with an infanticidal urge. Thirty years after “An American Family,” the Raymonds are being credited with inventing reality TV. Maybe it rankles them. If your baby grew up to be “The Real World: Las Vegas” you’d probably want to kill it, too.

It’s hard to fathom why Fox waited until last week to introduce “Andy Richter Controls the Universe” into its lineup. “Midseason replacement” doesn’t exactly have the clang of a ringing endorsement to it. Then again, it’s hard to fathom why most sitcoms aren’t even remotely funny by comparison. Maybe the sitcom universe is actually some kind of opposite land, where the jokes are meant to be predictable and the very special moments are a laugh riot. Maybe all the programming executives have been replaced by remote-controlled robots. Maybe tests have shown that people don’t want to laugh out loud during prime time and risk dislodging little bits of Stouffer’s frozen dinner from their mouths and send them flying across the room.

If you ask me, “Andy Richter Controls the Universe” is the only office comedy ever that really gets office humor; office humor being that giddy, loopy, unabashedly stupid humor that comes from a place of exhaustion, boredom and bottomless despair. Offices are rarely conveniently staffed with a Whitman’s Sampler of dysfunctional personalities — the narcissist, the bimbo, the buffoon. And even if they are, nobody stands around their workplace wittily putting each other down; they stand around their workplace with insincere smiles plastered across their faces dreaming up creative ways to smite each other.

Nobody who has ever sat through a three-hour meeting has done so without a well-developed coping strategy. For example, meetings go by a lot faster if you imagine the person sitting next to you suddenly ripped off their clothes, jumped on the conference table and belted out “Over the Rainbow.” That’s the beauty of having a job. Your body is trapped, but your mind is free to soar.

In the season’s first episode, Andy’s boss Jessica (the marvelously deadpan Paget Brewster) tells him and his colleagues that the company is offering a finder’s fee of $3,000 to anyone who helps recruit a nonwhite technical writer to the firm. “A few days later we met in Jessica’s office to help a nonwhite person, who, traditionally, we wouldn’t have cared about,” Andy explains.

Andy’s co-workers, Keith (James Patrick Stuart), Wendy (Irene Molloy) and Byron (Jonathan Slavin), each make the case for their candidate. “Ted has five years experience,” Andy says, “and he’s been black his whole life, which has not been easy in this racist society.”

“Well,” says Wendy, “my candidate is a woman from Saudi Arabia. She watched as her mother was stoned to death for driving a car — a bumper car.”

After listening to everybody’s pitch, Jessica decides to go with Wendy’s candidate over Byron’s blind white guy and Keith’s “gay, one-armed, Native American little person” who, unfortunately, is not a technical writer. Then she takes the opportunity to add, “Guys, I just want to say that race is a very uncomfortable subject, but only by talking about it like we’ve been doing, have we proven — just how uncomfortable it really is.”

Andy’s candidate, Ted, winds up getting the job after the Saudi Arabian woman visits Saudi Arabia and is “stoned to death for having luggage with wheels,” and Andy is free to fulfill his dream of buying a second TV for his bedroom — one for when he is lying on his back and one for when he is lying on his side. (“I know, it’s crazy,” Jessica tells the disappointed Wendy. “But I bet in 10 years we’re all doing it.”)

The experience turns sour when Andy makes a few cracks about the Irish in front of Ted, who is black but proud of his Gaelic heritage. Ted complains to Jessica, who defends Andy against accusations of racism, then fails to see the problem when she realizes he wasn’t talking about African-Americans. A black human resources person has a similar reaction, and soon Andy, Jessica and the human resources manager wind up in sensitivity training, where a man standing at the front of the room greets them with the following: “Jews are cheap. Blacks are lazy. Asians can’t drive. Puerto Ricans steal.”

“Wow,” Andy thinks. “It was a powerful way to get our attention. Pointing out all the horrible, hurtful, stupid stereotypes. This guy was good.”

He does seem good, until another man walks in and says, “Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Mr. Stevens, your instructor.” He turns to the man at the front of the room. “Who are you?”

“Hey, Duane Farley. My guinea boss told me I have to take this seminar.”

In this week’s episode, Andy figured out that the perfect man he has found for Jessica is actually a set of identical twins (whom she later describes as “Talky” and “Humpy”) that are sharing her behind her back. Byron hires a prostitute to change the dressing on his wound because private nurses are too expensive. But that’s not really all that happens.

Actually, it doesn’t really matter much what happens. “Andy Richter Controls the Universe” understands how secondary plot is in sitcoms, and takes full advantage of the loophole. The show could never be accused of being realistic, but it is oddly true to life. Nothing ever really happens in the big picture, but it’s the awkward moments, the dark ironies and the little, imaginary things that keep life interesting.

And unlike most sitcoms, “Andy Richter” knows how to deliver a message in a way that doesn’t make you want to spray the set with bullets. Here’s one: “All I know is, I hate racists,” the glum Byron tells Andy after he returns from sensitivity training feeling a little too sensitive about race. “I hate everything about them; their music, their food, their so-called religion. The way their men are so skinny and their wives are so fat. But mostly, I hate the way they judge people based on tired stereotypes.”

The Soprano family’s fourth season on HBO dispensed with cliffhangers, opting instead for stalemates. Everything in Tony’s world seems to have reached a place of unresolved stasis. Christopher is out of rehab and doing well, but drifting away from Adriana and the prospect of marriage. Adriana’s desperation and angst at having been entrapped by the FBI seems to have mellowed into a morose fatalism, and she’s even starting to show symptoms of the same Stockholm Syndrome exhibited last season by Big Pussy Bompensiero as he sleepwalked toward his own death.

New York family boss Carmine Lupertazzi and Tony have reached an agreement on the Esplanade deal, so Johnny Sack is left in the lurch when Tony refuses to carry out the hit on Carmine. Uncle Junior’s legal problems are temporarily resolved when the judge declares a mistrial, but they are far from over. Carmela is worn down and depressed after Furio’s sudden departure. Furio, presumably, is wandering the streets of Naples, wondering whether his time would be better spent pining for Carmela or fearing for his life. Everybody is right back where they started — except that they know more, and they’ve been places they can’t return from and said things they can’t take back.

A friend once told me, when I confessed that I watch “The Sopranos” the way I flip through a family photo album — you know, to wallow in it — that he thinks Americans could be equally split between people who grew up in the world of “The Sopranos” and people who grew up in the world of Jonathan Franzen’s novel “The Corrections.” (Another friend claims to have come from both: “Dad’s side: Thuggish confrontation, stoicism, alcoholism, seething resentment. Mom’s side: Passive-aggressive behavior, WASPy repression, self-sacrificing martyrdom, Midwestern farmer mentality, alcoholism, seething resentment.”)

The point is that when Tony mentioned his kids’ inheritance he wasn’t kidding. “How could you eat shit from him for all those years?” Meadow screams at her mother, just after insinuating that the separation was caused by Carmela’s infatuation with Furio, and just before A.J. begins a desperate campaign to align himself with his father by complaining about his mom’s constant nagging. “She’s always screaming that my dinner’s getting cold!” This, of course, only makes Tony’s Old World mother-worship kick into high gear. “She works hard to make those meals!” he says, slipping A.J. a few bills and instructing him to buy her flowers.

Tony and Carmela wind up playing out a mean-mommy/bratty-baby scene of their own by the pool, and later Carmela belittles Tony’s purchase of the beach house by insisting it’s just a sop, “like a big emerald ring.” (Tony, naturally, retorts that Carmela always knew what she was signing on for. What’s more, had she married the other guy she was seriously considering marrying — a guy whose father owned a snowplow business — “we now know that wouldn’t have suited you at all!”)

If the “Sopranos” season overall was somewhat of a disappointment, the fight scenes between Tony and Carmela were worth the price of admission alone: They were more brutal than any whacking and astonishingly gimlet-eyed. The day the divorce is announced is a key moment in the lives of roughly 50 percent of Americans (and Westerners in general), yet it’s hard to think of another TV scene that sets its sights on the moment it all comes unglued and never turns away.

As one friend said after watching it, “I’m sure I speak for other survivors of crappy, disintegrating middle-class marriages when I say that was a uniquely painful episode. Talk about primal scenes: The day your parents announce that it’s over is a rite of passage up there with first kiss, first drink and/or joint and losing your virginity.” As another one said, “I’m not exactly the emotive Kurt Cobain-style child of divorce, but that finale really kicked me in the shins emotionally.” Me too. I was exactly Meadow’s age when the hammer came down.

Watching the end come in waves and stages — of hysteria (“Don’t ever touch me again!”), cynical sang-froid (“That’s what you came out here to tell me?”), blame (“I’m going to hell, remember? Nice thing to tell a guy going into an MRI”), guilt (“I always regretted saying that”), woeful nostalgia (“You were my guy — you were so sweet sometimes and no one could make me laugh like you”), bitter sarcasm (“What you really crave is a little Hyundai and a simple gold heart on a chain”) and petty revenge (“I have been dreaming and fantasizing and in love with Furio”) — it’s hard not to wonder how creator David Chase and his writers manage to remember it all so perfectly, precisely, painfully well.

Beyond the clever “two families” conceit, “The Sopranos” has always been in a class of its own when it comes to alarmingly realistic portrayals of middle-class family dynamics. At the beginning of the season, Chase announced that season four would focus on Tony and Carmela’s marriage, a somewhat bewildering statement given all that had come before.

Now it seems clear that what Chase meant to say — but couldn’t — was that season four would focus on the end of Tony and Carmela’s marriage (whether or not they stay separated, because that story is far from over.) The only thing missing from last night — possibly apart from a scene where Meadow stops wanting to sleep with her boyfriend — was a scene in which the ducks come home to roost. But it now seems like a sure bet they’ll be back next season.