Originally a Japanese manga in the 1990s, the Meteor Garden format narrates a story about four rich boys with good looks and a poor girl with an attractive personality. Among the format's variants, two TV drama versions were produced: Meteor Garden, by Taiwan producers in 2001; and With the View Of Meteor Shower, by mainland China's producers in 2009. The former is a super hit with significant influence on all of Asia. The latter is the latest adaptation, located in a unique social context. In analyzing these two television dramas, the authors explore the relationship between popular culture and power in the Meteor Garden format. Our textual analysis focuses on the signification system of the Meteor Garden format and is supplemented by the analysis of character dialogue. The discourse analysis explicates how personal pronouns and metaphors discursively construct the contradiction between two different stratum identities, the rich and the poor. Finally, we analyze the fantasies of "modern lifestyle" and "modern love tale" inherent in the Meteor Garden format. This format oversimplifies modern life, by equating modern life to rich life with the multiple-signifiers-single- signified representation, which betrays the ideal of "life politics" proposed by Anthony Giddens. Moreover, the rich-poor contradiction has been constructed by the discursive opposition between the personal pronouns "you" and "we," which is dramatized by the metaphors "parasites" and "weeds." In order to bridge the rich-poor gap, the format provides audiences with a symbolic solution, that is, the modern Cinderella myth. On one hand, the romantic love between the rich Prince Charming and the poor Cinderella advocates a pure relationship. But on the other hand, it reconciles the conflicts between the two opposite stratums and accordingly transfers social responsibility to individuals. In short, the Meteor Garden format actualizes modern fantasies and to some extent helps to maintain the status quo, which are similarities shared by both the Taiwan version and the mainland version. Despite the similarities, the two versions differ significantly in ways that might be caused by their different social contexts. In comparison with the Taiwan variant, the mainland show bears a lesser degree of "semiotic excess." Furthermore, With the View Of Meteor Shower conspicuously beautifies the dark side of mainland China. By constructing a perfect character, a land agent, the mainland version purifies the image of the real estate industry, which has actually caused many severe social problems in China. Chinese audiences are indulged in modern fantasies and fail to see the real problems with the social structure. The mainland version thus contributes greatly to hegemony building.