HBO and Max CEO and Chairman Casey Bloys apologized to TV critics Thursday for his behavior for his trolling.
The chief was caught responding 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 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 upcoming 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,” Bloys said. “When you think about that, and then think of 2020 and 2021, I’m working from home and doing 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 emails, 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,” he said.
“So now, when I take issue with something in a review, or take issue with something I see, many of you are gracious enough to engage with me in a back and forth and I think that is a 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.”
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From there, the HBO chief moved on to start the presentation with footage from the upcoming season of “True Detective: Night Country.”
The remarks come just one day after Rolling Stone published a report detailing a lawsuit brought against the executives and HBO former employee Sully Temori claiming to be 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 was previously an executive assistant and claimed he was instructed to make a Twitter account for these purposes. Temori claims that he made an account under the fake name of Kelly Shepard, a vegan Texan mom.
Temori sent tweets from the account 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.
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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 claims 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.
