Casey Bloys, HBO and Max’s chairman and chief executive of content, has apologized after he was outed for using a pseudonymous X/Twitter account to attack critics who posted negative reviews of various HBO series.
Bloys called his secretive X account a “very dumb idea,” but he excused himself as merely overzealous to help the products on his network succeed, according to Variety.
“For those of you who know me, you know that I am a programming executive who is 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. “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. So when you think of that mindset, and then think of 2020 and 2021, I’m home, working from home and spending an unhealthy amount of scrolling through Twitter. And I come up with a very, very dumb idea to vent my frustration.”
“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 texts,” he said explaining that there were only a few 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 continued. “So now, when I take issue with something in a review, or take issue with something I see, I DM 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’ comments on the fake X/Twitter account came up as a result of a lawsuit by a former employee who is suing, accusing the network of wrongful termination.
According to Rolling Stone, a series of text messages written between Bloys and SVP of drama programming Kathleen McCaffrey features Bloys describing his use of the fake X account to reply to critics.
The employee suing the cable movie network, Sully Temori, alleges that Bloys directed him to create the fake X account so the executive could use it to secretly attack critics.
Temori also alleged that Bloys directed him to write replies to fans in comments sections who offered negative words about the network’s series and movies.
The disgruntled employee also alleges he was mistreated by his bosses while working on the series The Idol as a script coordinator in 2021.
Bloys has faced a series of uncomfortable situations this year. In one case, the new Max streaming service crashed on its first day upon its much-hyped launch back in May. The Max streaming service replaced HBO Max.
In April, Bloys came under fire when author J.K. Rowling was excluded from a Harry Potter retrospective documentary.
Bloys refused to answer questions about why Rowling was kept out of the production, saying, “That’s a very online conversation, very nuanced and complicated and not something we’re going to get into.”
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