i personally dislike both abs-cbn and willie revillame- i am an artist but im not sure if i am part of the "high brow" or "artsy fartsy" group that the blogger is referring to. I am not from a privileged background but i was able to go to the state university, met like-minded people from similar backgrounds and got my education there.
ABS/wowowee did everything just to win the ratings war- they trained their efforts towards the most basic of people's emotions- home-sickness, empathy for the needy, love of parents, sex-related humour, etc. and of course people were easily hooked. At times, while watching it in other people's houses, i felt as if the show has become a hyped-up version of "kapwa ko, mahal ko", complete with a sexy night club +las vegas-fiesta motif. it was horrible. the ploy i believe was to let the viewers watch "themselves" on TV- people with the same problems- all predicated with the need for money. so the contestants will first be asked to tell their sad stories and then right after burst into a one minute or so hyper song and/or dance number. so we've seen countless mothers, grandmothers being forced to dance ala sex bomb (or counterpart) and gay teens battling dancers in a "splitting" contest. furthermore, soon enough you can hear most of them spilling out the same lines as if on cue- because their situations have now become trivialized and stereotyped, even to them. An example that come to mind is the "anak- na-magpapakabait-na-mula ngayon-na-nagsosorry-sa-pagiging pasaway-sa-mga-nanay-tatay" or "kung-mananalo-ako- ipapagamot-ko-po-tatay-ko" These are all good if they are sincere and the promises are kept but do you really think these extremely personal declarations should be made on live TV and therefore served to viewers daily? And in the event that the contestant doesn't win or promises aren't kept, how have they benefited from the whole process then? And yet again, the clear, true winner and overall beneficiary here is the show.

now is this an 'artsy fartsy' observation? I dont really care if it is or not. but what i care about is that criticism about the media companies and personalities perpetuating stereotypes in the guise of "just giving people what they want" would be heard and not be quickly brushed aside as mere elitist comments.

for comparison, here's director spike lee's +others comments about the extremely popular, successful, money-making productions of tyler perry:

Despite praising Perry in 2006, in 2009 director Spike Lee criticized his work when interviewed by Ed Gordon on Our World with Black Enterprise, saying, "Each artist should be allowed to pursue their artistic endeavors but I still think there is a lot of stuff out today that is 'coonery' and buffoonery. I know it's making a lot of money and breaking records, but we can do better. … I see these two ads for these two shows [Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns and House of Payne] and I am scratching my head. … We got a Black president and we going back to Mantan Moreland and Sleep 'n' Eat?" When Gordon cited Perry’s success among black audiences and asked Spike if Perry wasn’t just giving black America what they wanted, he responded, "We've had this discussion back and forth. When John Singleton [created his films], people came out to see Boyz n the Hood, but when he did Rosewood, nobody showed up. So a lot of this is on us. You vote with your pocketbook, your wallet. You vote with your time sitting in front of the idiot box, and the man has a huge audience, Tyler's very smart. …We shouldn’t think that Tyler Perry is going to make the same film that I am going to make, or that John Singleton or my cousin Malcolm Lee [would make]. As African Americans, we're not one monolithic group so there is room for all of that, but at the same time, for me, the imaging is troubling and it harkens back to Amos 'n' Andy."
In September 2009, Jamilah Lemieux made similar remarks on National Public Radio. While thanking Perry for employing blacks in front of and behind the camera and for making work with humor and "positive messages about self-worth, love and respect," she criticized him for making television shows "marked by old stereotypes of buffoonish, emasculated black men and crass, sassy black women." She took him to task for his character of Madea saying that through this, "the country has laughed at one of the most important members of the black community: Mother Dear, the beloved matriarch. …Our mothers and grandmothers deserve much more than that." She stated that she appreciated that he was dismissive of critics' comments concerning his work, "but many black folks have expressed some of the very same attitudes about your work that white critics have." She stated that blacks "have been fed the same images of ourselves over and over and over because they sell." She felt that his success had been "mired with the worst black pathologies and stereotypes" and called on him to "stop dismissing the critics as haters and realize that black people need new stories and new storytellers."[29]
Lemieux’s criticism of Perry was cited and expanded upon by the author Tom Burrell in his 2010 book Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority. Burrell cited Perry’s 2008 film Meet the Browns as an example of when "we black people pull the trigger for our own image assassination."[30] Burrell also stated, "…it's not entirely fair to expect Perry to chart a new course alone. His movies and TV shows would not be so successful if blacks didn't have a raging appetite for messages and images that project us as dysfunctional or incompetent. Nothing that occurred during Amos 'n' Andy’s radio and television reign could match the words and actions of black comedies like Madea and The Browns. Our attraction to self-demeaning images came way before, and goes far beyond, Tyler Perry."Burrell called for new images of blacks in entertainment and a new vision of black self-image.
Perry (and Madea) were satirized in a June 2010 episode of the Adult Swim animated series The Boondocks; the Los Angeles Times called this episode "one of the sharpest public criticisms of Perry"

(from wikipedia)