At first blush, the brilliantly raunchy Danny McBride comedy “Eastbound & Down” might have seemed out of place among the erudite offerings on HBO. When the series premiered in February 2009, HBO was still known for its New York-centric and Hollywood-set comedies. “Eastbound” revolved around Kenny Powers, a washed-up, foulmouthed, amoral former professional baseball player who heads home to North Carolina.
“It’s the most important job in media,” says Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav. “He is the master class of nurturing and developing great creatives outside and inside HBO and curating amazing content. The result is the strongest HBO in history.” Most recently, Bloys’ skill has been borne out with “The Last of Us,” the new HBO drama series that has become a rare example of a hit video game adaptation, embraced by both discerning HBO viewers and players of the game . Bloys hadn’t heard of the Naughty Dog/Sony PlayStation game — nor had his head of drama programming, Francesca Orsi — before TV writer Craig Mazin brought it in to them as a prospect.
Mazin’s first instinct was to panic at the note. But because the suggestion came from Bloys, he knew it was made for the right reasons. “This was heartfelt,” Mazin says. “It was ‘I think this will be better for the audience.’ And he was right. It was really a smart observation. He and I are cut from the same vaudevillian cloth. We want to make the audience feel things.”
“He’s a terrific leader,” Cohen says. “It’s not an accident that they keep having the success that they have.” “He has the darkest fucking sense of humor that I’ve encountered in Hollywood, and I love it,” says Issa López, the executive producer behind HBO’s upcoming fourth installment of anthology drama “True Detective.” “I’m Mexican, and we have this culture rooted in finding humor in death and in misery. I’ve met very few people in show business in the U.S. that got that. And Casey’s one of them.”
After college, Bloys took a gig at advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather in New York, which led to a marketing job at Paramount in Los Angeles in 1996. He soon figured out that the secret to making it in TV was to become an assistant. Bloys was hired at CBS under current programming boss Laurie Zaks, and then began working for comedy head Gene Stein. When Stein moved to Disney/ ABC, Bloys followed.
“I could give you 20 more examples where Casey had the right taste, judgment and temperament,” Plepler says. By then, Bloys had been around HBO long enough to know that he had to always have his antennae up for the next big thing that would keep the network the leader of the prestige-TV pack. He knew “Game of Thrones” was coming to a natural end and remembered how adrift the company seemed at times after previous juggernauts faded to black and before new ones came into view.
And then there’s the other burden of the beast: A seemingly perpetual level of upheaval at HBO’s parent company over the past five years. When then-owner AT&T first announced plans to launch the HBO Max streaming platform, content oversight of that channel was given to then-TNT/TBS head Kevin Reilly rather than HBO leaders. That was unsettling to the tight-knit team at the pay cabler.
Whew. That’s a whirlwind Bloys doesn’t care to revisit. “I don’t think there’s any reason to go back there, but I will answer that by saying I feel really good about the current ownership and our future,” he allows when asked about those bumpy AT&T years. “As I talked to James and Peter about it, we’re going to develop these things and hopefully they’re all great,” Bloys says. “If they’re not, we’ll have other options and we’ll see. But what’s most exciting is that they’ve got a plan. Anything that James is excited about in terms of DC, I’m good with. I just want to make sure for Max that they’re the best shows that we can do.”
There have been plenty of learning curves for Bloys: Not everything based on established IP works out, as the “Gossip Girl” reboot proved. And refocusing HBO Max also came with some tough economic decisions, including the elimination of alternative and kids/family departments and a pullback in content, as previously renewed shows like “Minx” were canceled and projects from mega-producers like Greg Berlanti and J.J. Abrams were scrapped.
Talent reps say Bloys delivers the news, good or bad, in the classiest way imaginable. “He’s got really, really tough choices to make,” CAA’s Cohen says. “I believe that his intent is always to be straightforward, to cut right through and attempt to maintain good relations across the highest-end talent and also with us representatives. I think he’s terrific leader. It’s not an accident that they keep having the success that they have.
That's the poor fella Zaslav handed the bomb to cos they will make sure he's holding it when it explodes