When Casey Bloys become HBO’s CEO and chairman in October 2022, what did he hope his legacy in that office would be? He may well have hoped to oversee the network putting out another show routinely judged as the best ever. Instead he’s likely to be remembered for responding to criticism in the manner of an angry child, but one with an entire company behind them.
The practice of ‘sockpuppeting’ – leaping into an online argument using a dummy account, to make it seem like you have the weight of numbers on your side – is an old one online, a relic of the days of forum drama and of that greatest call to action, someone being wrong on the internet. You might expect this to be beneath top-level TV executives, and you’d be wrong, because, according to text messages reviewed by Rolling Stone, this is exactly what Bloys and Kathleen McCaffrey, HBO’s senior vice president of drama programming, have been up to.
The texts form part of a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by former HBO employee Sully Temori – much of which is more upsetting than petty online feuds, asserting that Temori was sexually harassed and faced discrimination related to a mental health diagnosis. But the big story is, in amongst this chain of casual insults, that Temori was ordered to create fake Twitter accounts to respond to critics of HBO’s programs.
The smoking-gun text messages published by Rolling Stone are no more, or less, laughable than you might expect. Bloys repeatedly directed McCaffrey to issue defensive tweets in response to often mild criticism, with Bloys’ suggested messages (eg “Maybe our friend needs to say what a shock it is that two middle aged white men [New York Times TV critics James Poniewozik and Mike Hale]…are shitting on a show about women”) reappearing almost verbatim in tweets sent by the non-existent Kelly Shepherd, a self-described “Mom. Texan. Herbalist. Aromatherapist. Vegan”.
(Temori’s attorney has confirmed outright that ‘Kelly Shepherd’ was Temori’s creation.)
Likewise, when McCaffrey texted Temori “Can our secret operative please tweet at [Rolling Stone TV critic Alan Sepinwall]’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”, sure enough, Kelly Shepherd promptly told Sepinwall, right to his Twitter-face, that he was as ever “predictably safe and scared in his opinions”. When approached for comment, Sepinwall said what many of us are likely thinking: “I’m surprised HBO would even bother with this.”
That “secret operative” stuff may sound like a face-saving psychic defence, a grandiose image intended order to obscure the reality of turning to 4chan tactics in an impotent attempt to strike back against a few bad reviews. It is, however, about par for the course here, with Bloys’ frequent references to “our friend” and use of McCaffrey as a cut-out all sounding eerily like an adolescent Sopranos fantasy.
Perhaps even more alarmingly, Bloys’ campaign also turned its ire against anonymous commenters on Deadline, in a campaign as poisonous as it was pathetic. “How dare someone write that!!” he fumed to McCaffrey, in response to a mention of the “Bloys-era cynicism of HBO development” (n’est-ce pas, Bloys?), and again brainstormed a pointed response: “I want to say something along the lines of ‘lol ok they are just counting their Emmys’ or something like that!?”
Most telling of all, another Deadline comment that claimed “Blogs (sic) is a cocky useless puppet who has no sense” received, by Bloys’ direction, the response “Hi [former HBO executive vice-president] David Levine! HBO seems just fine, thanks”. Which seems to suggest that, in a classic display of the typical mind fallacy, Bloys is convinced many other TV executives also spend their days hanging around the comment section incognito.
The unspeakably awful and filthy world of public relations has always been prone to this kind of clumsy manipulation. It wasn’t so very long ago that Sony simply fabricated positive reviews for the already well-received A Knight’s Tale . The internet has predictably sent this into overdrive, and more recently multiple critics came forward to state they were being paid outright to issue good reviews in order to flip films from negative to positive on Rotten Tomatoes.
But it’s rare you come across an example so tawdry in scale. Manipulating Rotten Tomatoes, at least, had the theoretical possibility to bump up viewing figures. Nobody is deciding what to watch based on a wounded spat from the comment section – which you’d imagine a TV CEO like Bloys would know perfectly well. And Bloys has since conceded this, putting his mad internet-war down to “an unhealthy amount of scrolling through Twitter” and “a very, very dumb idea to vent my frustration” in an apology which carefully didn’t mention the rest of the lawsuit.
While I couldn’t confirm Bloys’ take-home salary, those in comparable roles under the wider Warner Bros. Discovery umbrella enjoy compensation north of $2 million annually. That would translate to well over five thousand dollars a day for, in Bloys’ case, being far too online.
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