HBO and Max CEO and chairman Casey Bloys apologized to TV critics Thursday for using fake Twitter accounts to respond to negative reviews of HBO series, following a Wednesday report that revealed Bloys’ past behavior.
“For those of you who know me, you know that I am a programming executive who is very, very passionate about the shows that we decide to do. And the people who do them and the people who work on them,” Bloys said Thursday morning at the start of a presentation at HBO’s New York headquarters, an event to promote HBO and Max’s 2024 slate of programming, which has been planned since Oct. 16. “I want the shows to be great. I want people to love them. I want you all to love them. It’s very important to me what you all think of the shows. So when you think of that mindset, and then think of 2020 and 2021, I’m home, working from home and spending an unhealthy amount of scrolling through Twitter. And I come up with a very, very dumb idea to vent my frustration.”
Bloys continued: “Obviously, six tweets over a year and a half is not very effective. But I do apologize to the people who were mentioned in the leaked texts. Obviously, nobody wants to be part of a story that they have nothing to do with. But also, as many of you know, I have progressed over the past couple of years to using DMs. So now, when I take issue with something in a review, or take issue with something I see, I DM many of you, and many of you are gracious enough to engage with me in a back and forth and I think that is probably a much healthier way to go about this. But we’ll talk more about that, and you guys can ask me anything you want in the Q&A. I just wanted to put that out there.”
From there, the HBO chief moved on to start the presentation with footage from the upcoming season of “True Detective: Night Country.”
Bloys’ remarks come one day after Rolling Stone published a story detailing a lawsuit brought against the exec and HBO from former employee Sully Temori, who claims to have been wrongfully terminated.
Though not included in the lawsuit itself, Rolling Stone referenced alleged 2020 and 2021 text messages between Bloys and SVP of drama programming Kathleen McCaffrey. In the alleged text exchanges, Bloys and McCaffrey repeatedly discussed replying to critics who spoke negatively about HBO series, including “Perry Mason” and “Mare of Easttown,” by using fake Twitter accounts. Rolling Stone says these text messages, provided by Temori, were reviewed and verified via their metadata.
Temori, who at that time was an executive assistant, claims he was instructed to make a Twitter account for these purposes, which he did and attributed it to the fake person Kelly Shepard (a self-described vegan Texan mom). Temori sent tweets from this account, at Bloys’ request, in response to critics’ negative reviews.
Additionally, Temori told Rolling Stone that he left anonymous comments on some Deadline articles in response to other users’ negative remarks about HBO series and execs, at Bloys’ request.
Also mentioned in Temori’s lawsuit are McCaffrey, HBO head of drama Francesca Orsi, Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye and two producers on his now-canceled HBO drama “The Idol.” Temori alleges that he was mistreated on the set of that series once he became a scripted coordinator on the project in 2021, a position he was moved to from his executive assistant role.
From Variety US