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One might assume that HBO’s top executive has more important things to do than have TV critics attacked via fake social media accounts. But that is what CEO Casey Bloys did in 2020 and 2021.
We might never have learned of the tactic if it hadn’t been exposed during a wrongful termination lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court this summer by a former HBO employee. Text messages unearthed in the case show Bloys discussing and later executing the plan with Kathleen McCaffrey, senior vice president of drama programming at HBO.
For example, in one instance, Bloys was annoyed by a tweet about the HBO show Perry Mason from Vulture TV critic Kathryn VanArendonk, who wrote: “Dear prestige TV, please find some way to communicate male trauma besides showing me a flashback to the hero’s memories of trench warfare.”
Bloys strategized a response to her tweet: “Maybe a Twitter user should tweet that that’s a pretty blithe response to what soldiers legitimately go through on [the] battlefield,” he texted his VP McCaffrey, according to Rolling Stone. “Do you have a secret handle?”
They decided not to go after VanArendonk in that instance, but the unearthed texts showed that they actually did attack critics from fake Twitter accounts at other times.
A troll account was created (it’s unclear by whom) as a fake Texas mom called “Kelly Shepherd,” whose bio reads: “She/her. Mom. Texan. Herbalist. Aromatherapist. Vegan.”
In April 2021, the account attacked New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik after he opined that The Nevers, a sci-fi series, “feels like watching a show that someone has mysteriously deleted 25% of the scenes from.”
The supposed vegan Texas mom replied—at Bloys’s orders, the text messages showed—“How shocking that two middle aged white men (you & Hale) are shitting on a show about women,” referring to Times critic Mike Hale as well.
On Thursday, Bloys tried to explain his thinking during an event promoting HBO’s slate of programming for next year, as reported by Variety.
“I want the shows to be great…it’s very important to me what you think of the shows,” he said. “So think of that mindset, and then think of 2020 and 2021, I’m working from home, spending an unhealthy amount of time scrolling through Twitter. And I come up with a very, very dumb idea to vent my frustration.”
One of the complaints in the wrongful termination lawsuit was that the plaintiff, Sully Temori, had to perform tasks unrelated to his job, among them creating the fake accounts.
McCaffrey, according to the magazine, had approached Temori, explaining Bloys was “obsessed with Twitter” and asking whether there was “a way to create a dummy account that can’t be traced to us to do his bidding.”
Bloys told reporters on Thursday that he had changed his ways and was now directly messaging writers with his feedback.
Bloys appears in no imminent danger of losing his job, but other executives who engaged in anonymous social-media jousting with critics have lost theirs. In a similar event, Philadelphia 76ers general manager Bryan Colangelo resigned in 2018 following allegations he’d published internal information and criticized league officials on social media under pseudonyms. His wife later admitted to creating the Twitter accounts, while Colangelo distanced himself from any involvement. But the urge to respond to negative reviews is a powerful one.
