Season 1-4 of The Simpsons. Reality slowly starts to become flexible from Season 5 onwards but 1-4 have fairly accurate portrayals of working-class life. There's an episode, for example, where the family dog is sick and there's a possiblity of simply allowing the dog to die because they have no money to pay for the operation.
Seconding My Name Is Earl because it's awesome and fits your criteria.
Please reconsider The Wire (for reasons other people have already outlined) and Cold Case. Cold Case definitely acknowledges the imbalance of power between police and the public. There are many episodes where the detective are caught between their jobs and their backgrounds. In one episode, for example, a number of black boys go missing and the police did very little and didn't even pick up on the pattern. By the time the Cold Case detectives are on the case, they have to deal with families telling them that they don't care about black kids - even though the detectives are themselves black or from poor areas.
If you decide to consider a made-for-tv movie, I'd also like to recommend Beautiful Thing. It's based on the play of the same name and is about two teenaged boys on a council estate in the UK who fall in love.
I enjoyed reading this post and all the comments, thanks for starting this discussion!