Tale as old as time.
Courtesy of Cheyenne Roundtree of Rolling Stone, it seems not all is well in the land of HBO. At least, with minimum one executive. As apparently Chairman and CEO of “HBO and Max Content” Casey Bloys maintains an army of sockpuppet accounts to fire back at TV critics. Case in point, one Kathryn VanArendonk, who writes for Vulture TV, who disliked Perry Mason‘s use of flashbacks to “trench warfare to communicate male trauma”
“Dear prestige TV,” [Vulture TV critic Kathryn VanArendonk] wrote, “Please find some way to communicate male trauma besides showing me a flashback to the hero’s memories of trench warfare.”
Bloys was annoyed, according to text messages reviewed by Rolling Stone, and sent VanArendonk’s tweet to Kathleen McCaffrey, HBO’s senior vice president of drama programming. “Maybe a Twitter user should tweet that that’s a pretty blithe response to what soldiers legitimately go through on [the] battlefield,” he texted. “Do you have a secret handle? Couldn’t we say especially given that it’s D-Day to dismiss a soldier’s experience like that seems pretty disrespectful … this must be answered!”
Bloys was serious. “Who can go on a mission,” he asked McCaffrey, according to the messages, adding that they needed to find a “mole” at “arms length” from the HBO executive team. “We just need a random to make the point and make her feel bad.”
Bloys eventually landed on the following rebuttal to VanArendonk:
A somewhat elitist take. Is there anything more traumatic for men (and now women) than fighting in a war. Sorry if that seems too convenient for you.
The accounts used for these sorts of rebuttals are exactly what you’re imagining; low quality, low posts (all aimed exclusively at critics), stock image profile pictures, the works. The above exchange between executives is one of six such known instances of the two referring to a “secret army” of this sort. To put it bluntly, most of these can be clocked by their handles which are essentially NormalNamebunchanumbers.
The cruel joke of all of this is that it likely wouldn’t have ever been noticed if not for a wrongful termination suit by former HBO staffer Sully Temori against HBO and several executives, as well as Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye and two producers for The Idol.
Regardless, the petty sniping that Bloys seems fixated on engaging with is kind of sad. Good work tends to stand for itself. Attempting to clap back against every little dissenting opinion really only hurts the end product over time.
Source: BoingBoing
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