When one thinks of HBO, one thinks of prestige TV and the network’s spate of wildly popular shows: most recently, “Succession, “The Last Of Us,” “House Of The Dragon,” and “Euphoria,” among others. But what about the HBO series that don’t fare as well with critics and audiences? Well, apparently HBO‘s CEO Casey Bloys has a special remedy to combat negative reviews: burner accounts on social media to troll critics of his shows.
IndieWire (via Rolling Stone) reports that Bloys’ deployment of burner accounts is one of many allegations against him in a wrongful termination lawsuit against HBO. Sully Temori, who files the lawsuit, claims Bloys and SVP of drama programming Kathleen McCaffrey continually discussed using burner accounts to combat critics of their shows on Twitter. RS reports that there are at least six different exchanges over text message between the two executives about spamming critics with a fake Twitter account over negative reviews for “The Nevers,” “Perry Mason,” and “Mare Of Easttown.” Metadata verifies these messages after review.
So this fake Twitter account actuallly exists? Indeed it does. Bloys first texted McCaffrey with the idea to respond to a negative tweet about Season 1 of “Perry Mason” from Vulture TV Critic Kathryn VanArendonk in April 2020. But the pair didn’t first put their idea into practice until a year later, when an account from “Texas mom and herbalist” Kelly Shepard retweeted Rolling Stone TV critic Alan Sepinwall’s negative take on “The Nevers.” “Alan is always predictably safe and scared in his opinions,” reads Shepard’s tweet. According to RS, the response’s language matches what McCaffrey allegedly texted to Temori, while the account’s profile picture is a stock photo used on several business websites.
It’s not the first time HBO employees used Kelly Shepard’s account to clap back at critics. The fake profile also replied to negative reviews to “The Nevers,” including James Poniewozik, The New York Times’ chief TV critic. Shepard also lashed out at Vulture’s Sepinwall again for a mixed reviews of “Mare Of Easttown.” Temori also claims he used anonymous accounts to defend HBO shows in the comments section of Deadline, a popular Hollywood trade.
Temori’s allegations are part of a broader lawsuit against HBO, claiming his former bosses McCaffrey, HBO head of drama Francesca Orsi, and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye discriminated against him after he disclosed a mental health diagnosis. Temori first joined HBO in 2015 as a temp before becoming an executive assistant in 2017 and then a script coordinator on Tesfaye’s “The Idol” in August 2021. He was then laid off in October 2021 after he claims Tesfaye and other producers of “The Idol” continually harassed him.
Among other things, Temori claims Orsi forced him to babysit rescue kittens in her office while she joked on the phone he was playing with them to “improve his mental health.” Temori also cites numerous times he was harassed for his sexual orientation, claiming one employee slapped hit butt and “comment[ed] about personal and sexual matters. An HBO spokesperson declined to comment on Temori’s lawsuit. “HBO intends to vigorously defend against Mr. Temori’s allegations. We are not going to comment on select exchanges between programmers and errant tweets,” HBO said to IndieWire in the statement. “We look forward to a full and fair resolution of this dispute. In the meantime, we wish Mr. Temori, a former HBO employee, well in his future endeavors.”
As for HBO head Bloys, Deadline reports the CEO responded to the allegations against his at this presentation for the 2024 release calendars for HBO and Max. “We’re here to talk about ’24, but I thought we might as well talk about it up front,” said this morning. “For those of you who know me, you know 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. I want the shows to be great. I want people to love them. I want you all to love them. It’s very, very important to me what you think of all the shows.”
“So when you think of that mindset, and think of 2020 and 2021, I am home, working from home, spending an unhealthy amount of time scrolling through Twitter and I come up with a very, very dumb idea to vent my frustration,” Bloys continued. “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 emails and texts. Obviously, nobody wants to be part of a story they had nothing to do with.”
“But also as many of you know, I have progressed over the past couple of years to using DMs,” Bloys went on. “Now, when 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. It’s a probably much healthier way to go about this.”
