Katrina made TV and its audience see the underclass

? Katrina introduced the nation’s Haves to the sight of its Have-nots.

A hurricane was needed (plus the blundering emergency response) to remind us that every resident of New Orleans couldn’t simply jump into his SUV and flee to higher ground.

Then, with the awful aftermath unfolding, a hapless cast of thousands seized TV’s attention on a scale never matched before by the underclass – Americans overwhelmingly poor and black who paid a terrible price for the exposure.

But when, if ever, will they be seen again? What – besides some new, unimaginable crisis – could repeat for them that level of acknowledgment by TV, whose default mode is the comfortably mainstream?

Consider the broadcast networks’ lineup of 31 new fall prime-time series. Only three have even nodding acquaintance with a lifestyle where material sufficiency isn’t assumed, where people teeter on the edge.

NBC’s reality series “Three Wishes” (which premieres Friday) dispatches singer Amy Grant to small-town America, where she and a team of good Samaritans lend a hand to ordinary folks in need of a boost.

UPN’s sitcom “Everybody Hates Chris” (premiering Thursday) revisits the childhood of comedian Chris Rock. Growing up in circa 1982 Brooklyn, young Chris confronts racism at the all-white high school he is bused to, while his penny-pinching father works two jobs to keep the family fed.

Recording artist Amy Grant will play host to NBC's new reality series Three

The only other new show that ventures beyond the socio-economic comfort zone is NBC’s comedy “My Name Is Earl” (which premiered Tuesday), whose cartoonish anti-hero is a paragon of poor white trash.

But the ghetto holds scant interest for TV. TV prefers a middle-class pleasure dome outfitted with a penthouse for the fabulously well-heeled (these days, Donald Trump occupies the J.R. Ewing suite).

Never mind that this sanctuary of TV affluence clashes sharply with 2005 Census figures that show 37 million people living under the poverty line.

A team of “compensation experts” at the salary.com Web site recently analyzed a sampling of 60 TV fathers from series spanning the past six decades. They found today’s fictitious breadwinners command an average salary of $195,000 per year – more than twice the salary of their 1950s counterparts, who averaged $75,000 (in 2005 dollars).

Meanwhile, the real-life median U.S. household income in 2004 was $44,500.