For weeks HBO and Max CEO and Casey Bloys has been scheduled to give a presentation to media in New York, sharing new footage from the network’s upcoming programming and answering questions. But only yesterday did he likely realize how many of the questions would be about him. Following Rolling Stone’s report that Bloys had instructed his employees to set up fake social media accounts to respond to critics who annoyed him, Bloys opened his presentation Thursday morning with an apology.
Saying that he was spending an “unhealthy amount of time scrolling through Twitter” in 2020 and 2021, Bloys admitted that the sock puppet Twitter accounts were “a very, very dumb idea to vent my frustration.” Per Rolling Stone, at the time Bloys took issue with critics like Vulture’s Kathryn VanArendonk, who was not a fan of flashbacks on Perry Mason, as well as a review of The Nevers by Rolling Stone’s Alan Sepinwall—who just so happened to be sitting in one of the front rows at Bloys’s presentation.
“You know that I am a programming executive, very, very passionate about the shows that we decide to do,” Bloys said. “I want the shows to be great. I want people to love them. I want you all to love them.” But while apologizing to the people like Sepinwall who were specifically mentioned in the Rolling Stone report, Bloys said he’s found more constructive ways to engage with critics in recent years. “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’ve DM’ed 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.”
Bloys’s requests for fake Twitter accounts were revealed as part of a wrongful-termination lawsuit from former HBO staffer Sully Temori. According to the suit, the requests came to Temori via HBO senior vice president of drama programming Kathleen McCaffrey, who told Temori in a text that Bloys was “obsessed with Twitter,” and “always wants to pick a fight on Twitter.” According to Rolling Stone, lawyers representing HBO have requested that a judge dismiss Temori’s complaint, with HBO denying “each and every allegation.”