The problem with these shows is that we can see all they have, but very little on how they were obtained - gifts, bought prior to being on benefits, really good deals and debt. The TV I currently have looks like a wide flat screen one - it was a free gift from a friend when he upgraded. The one before, old box job, £20 on eBay. Sky boxes can be bought secondhand and used as freeview boxes, a basic subscription is less than £25, can be gifted to people (we got ours when my inlaws got a great 'get a friend to buy one, get a free upgrade' deal years back). All of our furniture is gifts, charity and second hand shops, or built . I'm sitting in the living room and the only thing I can see that as bought new is storage baskets that were less than £5. The presumption that these all were bought full price in their current situation is part of rhetoric that poor people deserve to be poor.
Worst, I find that they teach that the poor deserve no fun, no joy, nothing but survive if that (with ill people being begrudged heat) - because the systems say that the needs of life must be exchange for with cash that it controls. When the energy company can triple your monthly bill in a flash without a word to you, when your closet shops sell only junk food and ready meals and the cost to get to one that sells proper food eats into your grocery budget, when everything you need is in the hands of others, how much control do you really have on your circumstances? We don't attack the systems that force these situation, that prevent any real control, the media attacks those trying to find some joy in a system that begrudges them existence at all.
I live in an area where all the main traditional employers are not hiring and most are laying people off. I know one person who on and off the dole for years now because crap temp jobs have become the new major employer. The system has made temporary, part-time, underpaid jobs the norm. I do know a disabled man who managed to get a rare permanent full time job - but that was after years of being bounced between disability and unemployment benefit, years of asking for help from the system and being told he can't get help getting work on disability and can't get help his disabilities on unemployment and by chance getting help from a recruiter who took the time to help him in hopes of passing his improved details and CV on. The system is broken and we blame those trying to make their way in it.
I am a person who starved as a child by a man who could more than afford to feed me - and all I was taught then and taught now by these programmes is that he is allowed to get away with it and be a welcome member of his community because he has money and his family has a network. I had social services literally pull into the driveway after a complaint from my teacher, talk to my father for two minutes, and then drive away. I was put into a group for depressed teens at 11 which was actually the schools only way of helping and guiding those of us who were being neglected and abused because they knew kids in our area didn't get social services' attention. I told a cop at 14 that I had been left home alone for weeks and likely wouldn't see a parent for a few more and they were more concerned that animals had gotten into the rubbish and made a mess of their pretty street than my welfare. I had a school nurse spread rumours that I was anorexic to cover the weight loss I suffered by neglect. A person trying to live with shock bills in poverty, cope with raising living costs with disabilities, being taken advantage of by others, by companies, by the system gets more scorn and hate in these programmes, in this culture, than someone who with a good postcode and a starving child. These shows support a system where our lives are nothing more than commodities, knowing that the current system would happily leave us to die and the poor get blamed for it - never thinking that its the systems that need to be challenged, taken apart, and changed.