United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard is adding his voice to a chorus of protesters criticizing Viacom Inc. for a proposal by CBS to create a new reality TV show modeled after the 1960s sitcom, "The Beverly Hillbillies."

Gerard, a Canadian who lives in Pittsburgh, joins United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts in asking Viacom to cancel a show that would follow the life and times of a poor, rural family from Appalachia that moves, at network expense, into a Beverly Hills mansion.

"Poverty and lack of education may be a joke to those who select television programming, but they are not to the millions of working poor in this country who strive to live their lives with dignity and pride,'' Gerard said in a letter posted this week to Viacom executives.

Opposition to the proposed show has grown steadily since January when a nonprofit group from Kentucky, the Center for Rural Strategies, placed ads in the New York Times and other large urban newspapers criticizing the series as demeaning to rural people.

Roberts is so incensed about the show, "The Real Beverly Hillbillies," that he is urging members of his union and their supporters to protest Viacom's May 21 shareholders meeting in Manhattan.

A native of West Virginia, Roberts suggested that CBS consider a reality show about highly paid executives who would be relocated to a rural area where they would be required to find a job that paid enough to support a family with health care and pension benefits.

"If we're lucky, maybe one of them will end up working a 30-inch seam in a nonunion coal mine,'' Roberts said. "Now, that would be real entertainment."

Dee Davis, president of the Center for Rural Strategies, said yesterday that he was amazed at the widespread support the campaign against the show had received. Scores of politicians, advocacy groups and several large unions have taken up the cause. Thousands of people have sent e-mails to the network.

CBS, which announced plans for the show last fall, has told Davis that it is giving serious consideration to whether or not the show will be telecast. The network has looked in rural states for an extended family to star in the show.

"We're getting more unions calling every day,'' Davis said. "People are getting tired of reality TV. Sometimes it's an affront, and you wonder how much farther can they go with this stuff."