There is no brand more associated with quality fiction than HBO, the American channel that in the late 90s redefined the parameters of adult series, with the exception perhaps of the BBC. But, as has been discovered, even in the house of The Sopranos, Sex and the City and Game of Thrones have security and, as Rolling Stone magazine has revealed, the managers have come to use underhanded methods with the aim of neutralizing the criticism: using fake accounts to mess with those who signed opinions they didn't like.
The first time there was an attempt to pressure critics, that there is any evidence of it, was in June 2020 when Kathryn Van Arendonk, who writes for Vulture, criticized the series Perry Mason for using war flashbacks to talk about the male trauma, a resource that I considered very trite. Casey Bloys, who was then president of HBO programming and since October 2022 has held the title of CEO of both the HBO channel and the HBO Max platform, wrote to Kathleen McCaffrey, vice president of programming, if they did not have a secret account with which counterattack criticism.
He considered it distasteful to mess with the war experience of so many men and women. “We just need someone to talk her down to make her feel bad,” she wrote to her co-worker. On that occasion, she finally did not harass critics from the anonymity offered by fake accounts on Twitter but, as they have been able to see from the cultural magazine, there were occasions in which they did so.
With a profile created from a photograph in an image database that claimed to be a mother from Texas, they tried to discredit Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone critic, for having considered The Nevers to be an irregular series, just as they did with New York Times critic James Poniewozik for opinions on the same series.
“Maybe our friend should say what a shock that two middle-aged white men are shitting on a series about women,” Bloys wrote to McCaffrey, an opinion that was later reflected on the social network. This strategy of trying to undermine the image of critics from anonymous accounts was not only applied to Twitter but, from the comments section of Deadline, one of the most incisive publications of the television industry in the US, anonymity was used to defending the HBO brand and managers when detractors appeared among readers.
How did it become known that Bloys used methods typical of dirty media warfare to combat detractors of his work or the works he released? Thanks to Sully Temori, who worked at HBO until he was fired and who is now suing HBO, McCaffrey, Francesca Orsi, head of drama, and up to three producers of The Idol, including The Weeknd. He accuses them of firing him after starting to make his life miserable when he reported mental health problems to his bosses.
Rolling Stone, which has offered graphic evidence of these tweets issued from false accounts, has verified that they are not unjustified accusations: it has been able to analyze that the metadata of the communications provided confirm that these interactions between Bloys and his colleagues really happened. And how did Temori know? Because, as the former work has reported, she was supposedly tasked with creating these fake profiles to invalidate those influencers most critical of HBO premieres.
