Casey Bloys to Face Reporters Amid Fake Tweets DramaA plaintiff accused HBO's chief of ordering the trolling of TV critics under fabricated personas
In a case of awkward timing, Casey Bloys is scheduled to appear before dozens of reporters tomorrow morning in New York, a number of whose outlets were targets of an embarrassing Twitter scheme allegedly concocted by the HBO and Max chairman and CEO, and revealed in a bombshell Rolling Stone story that dropped on Wednesday. The Ankler has learned from a source close to Bloys that he will in fact face the music on Thursday morning at a presentation of HBO’s 2024 content slate at which the 19-year HBO veteran will both present and field questions from the press and have some explaining to do (if lawyers allow). The Rolling Stone story revealed that Bloys — one of the most powerful and respected executives in the industry — and his senior vice president of drama programming, Kathleen McCaffrey, coordinated online responses to critical reviews and comments about the company by setting up dummy social media accounts to push back against writers at publications like New York Magazine, The New York Times and Rolling Stone. The article included several text exchanges between Bloys, McCaffrey and a former HBO executive assistant named Sully Temori, who was tasked with setting up the fake accounts and who is now suing HBO (the text exchanges were included in Temori’s suit, alleging wrongful termination). In one exchange, McCaffrey wrote to Temori that Bloys is “obsessed with Twitter” adding that “He always texts me asking me to find friends to reply… is there a way to create a dummy account that can’t be traced to us to do his bidding,” she asked. The story, which centered on the lawsuit, paints Bloys as a petty and thin-skinned executive incapable of brooking any criticism of HBO’s shows or of his leadership style. “His highness needs another one. We need our friend to call out Alan for Mare,” McCaffrey texted on another occasion referring to Rolling Stone critic Alan Sepinwall who had written critically about the HBO show Mare of Easttown. All the fake accounts that were set up over the years ultimately led Bloys to think that he ruled over a “secret army” that he could then sic on his critics, according to the Rolling Stone article.
After Sepinwall gave the HBO show The Nevers a dismal review, McCaffrey texted: “Casey is looking for a tweeter… he’s mad at Alan Sepinwall. Can our secret operative please tweet at Alan’s review: ‘Alan is always predictably safe and scared in his opinions.’ And then we have to delete this chain right? Omg I just got scared lol.” Some of Bloys rebuttals weren’t even fact-checked. When New York Times chief TV critic James Poniewozik tweeted that The Nevers “feels like watching a show that someone has mysteriously deleted 25% of the scenes from” Bloys sent the tweet to McCaffrey, with the added message: “Maybe our friend needs to say what a shock it is that two middle aged white men (referring to Poniewozik and Times TV critic Mike Hale) are shitting on a show about women.” Hale, in fact, is not white. He is half-Asian. One showrunner tells The Ankler after having read the Rolling Stone article, “This is a side of him that he keeps pretty well hidden. But in the HBO book (James Andrew Miller’s Tinderbox) there’s a section where he reveals himself and tells some underling that he’ll get his army to do his bidding.” A CRITIC TARGETEDKathryn VanArendonk, a critic at New York Magazine’s Vulture was one of the writer’s whose Tweet about the HBO show Perry Mason prompted a critical comment/rebuttal from one of the dummy accounts that Temori set up at Bloys’ request. “Part of what I think is funny about this is that anyone who posts anything online, especially critics and journalists who are using social media are just so familiar with an onslaught of responses,” she tells The Ankler. “Many of them [are] incredibly negative from the public, that’s par for the course, so part of what’s a little bit funny about this is the sense that the one comment wouldn’t really stand out from the rest of what we get online. It is a little surprising he would be spending his time responding to individual critics this way … There’s something a little bit fun about the fact that… an HBO executive would make a sock pocket account to yell at a TV critic.” A spokesperson for HBO declined to comment and referred us to a statement that reads: “HBO intends to vigorously defend against Mr. Temori’s allegations. We are not going to comment on select exchanges between programmers and errant tweets.” As for punitive action? A senior source at HBO says likely no. According to the WBD corporate website, “Under his leadership, Bloys’ compelling slate of groundbreaking original programming has continued to breakthrough. In 2022, his programming received 38 Emmy® Awards across 13 titles, more than any network or streaming platform; it was also the most nominated with 140 nods, besting HBO’s previous record of 137 nominations in 2019.” But another source close to Warner Bros. Discovery is less convinced the organization gets off scot-free: “Someone involved will pay the price at some point.”
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