HBO and Max chief Casey Bloys apologized to TV critics regarding his use of fake Twitter accounts to troll them for their negative reviews of his network's shows, Variety reported.

“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,” he said at an event promoting HBO and Max's 2024 programming on Thursday.

Bloys: Very dumb idea

Bloys added, “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.”

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A report on Wednesday detailed Bloys' directive on targeting TV critics who had less than favorable reviews on HBO shows. A wrongful termination lawsuit filed by former HBO assistant Sully Temori included Bloys' instruction to use secret handles to troll critics.

“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. 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. 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. But we’ll talk more about that, and you guys can ask me anything you want in the Q&A. I just wanted to put that out there,” he continued.

While Bloys was not named in the lawsuit, HBO senior VP of drama programming Kathleen McCaffrey was. She was on the receiving end of Bloys' text messages with instructions to reply to the critics' comments on Twitter (now X).

These instructions were then relayed to Temori. He created a fake persona, Kelly Shepard, to send tweets to several TV critics. Some of these critics were from The New York Times, Rolling Stone and Vulture.