‘His Dark Materials’ Producer Bad Wolf Options Empire Magazine Editor Terri White’s Memoir ‘Coming Undone’

EXCLUSIVE: Bad Wolf, the UK producer behind His Dark Materials and A Discovery Of Witches, is to adapt Empire magazine editor-in-chief Terri White’s memoir into a TV series.

Bad Wolf has optioned Coming Undone after the book was published this summer by Canongate. It documents the conflict between her outward success and private trauma that spiraled into a mental health crisis, which resulted in White spending time on a psychiatric ward.

The memoir also reveals, often in unflinching and palpable detail, her childhood growing up in poverty, as well as enduring sexual and physical abuse at the hands of her mother’s partners. “I heard the wind rush through the gap between his thumb and first finger as he brought it down from on high; the whoosh snuffed out by the crack of hand on skin and bone,” she writes on being punched by a grown man.

Commenting on the Bad Wolf partnership, White said: “To say I’m excited about working with Bad Wolf on an adaptation of Coming Undone is a gargantuan understatement. Their reputation for producing bold, brave, brilliant telly makes them the perfect home for my book – one I wrote to try and give a voice to what so many of us experience in the shadows. That voice is set to get a lot louder.”

Executive producer Kate Crowther added: “Coming Undone is an exceptional, powerful memoir from the ferociously talented Terri White, and from the moment I read it I knew we were the right team to develop it.”

White has worked as the editor-in-chief of Empire since September 2015 and she previously performed the same role for Time Out in New York. Bad Wolf’s deal to option Coming Undone was brokered by Anna Pallai at AMP Literary.