A new lawsuit alleges that HBO’s Casey Bloys told staffers to tweet snarky comments at critics who were mean to his shows online. According to a report in Rolling Stone, starting in 2020, HBO’s then-president of original programming allegedly instructed staffers to create false Twitter (now X) accounts for this purpose.
One of the big “sore spots” for Bloys, according to Rolling Stone, was the Joss Wheedon steampunk fantasy, The Nevers. If you don’t remember The Nevers, god I wish I were you. It was a genuinely horrible show, full of Wheedon-isms and inhabiting a murky world that had the kind of aesthetics best suited to the steampunk corner of a Spirit Halloween store.
The article states that Kathleen McCaffrey, HBO’s senior vice president of drama programming, texted another staffer: “Casey is looking for a tweeter… he’s mad at Alan Sepinwall—” (the Rolling Stone critic who gave The Nevers a generous 2.5 stars) “—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.”
The best thing about this is that the tweets are still up.
Bloys—whose current title is Chairman and CEO of HBO and Max Content—also apparently asked his employees to respond to criticisms to The Mare of Easttown, the Perry Mason remake, and Run. All these allegations are being released as part of a wrongful termination lawsuit that Sully Temori, a former staffer at HBO, is bringing against various members of the company. These texts and conversations are being released because, according to the report,“[Temori] also was allegedly asked to perform menial tasks not related to his work duties, such as creating fake online accounts to respond to critics.”
HBO has responded to The Hollywood Reporter, saying via a spokesperson, “HBO intends to vigorously defend against Mr. Temori’s allegations. We are not going to comment on select exchanges between programmers and errant tweets.”
Rolling Stone further reports that Bloys—who famously said that J.K. Rowling’s transphobia was an “online issue” earlier this year, as reported by Deadline and other sources—would also get mad at offhand remarks in the Deadline comment section. The level of petty this man must have felt in between his massive paychecks should be studied in a lab.
Updated: 11/1, 5:27 pm, ET: Added a comment from HBO given to The Hollywood Reporter.
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