When journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes released Shattered, their book about Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the presidency, last month, Clinton’s campaign staffers were none too pleased with its depiction of a dysfunctional campaign beset by infighting and petty squabbles. But those staffers may soon be forced to confront Allen and Parnes’s version of events on the small screen: The New York Times reports that Shattered has been optioned for a limited TV series.
As the Times points out, Shattered would not be the first 2016 campaign book to get a series order. Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, authors of the best-selling campaign books Game Change and Double Down, are at work on a book about the 2016 election that has already been optioned for a miniseries by HBO — which also aired a 2012 film adaptation of Game Change.
In April, when Shattered was published, the Clinton campaign’s deputy communications director, Christina Reynolds, took to Medium to dispute the book. “It’s hard to read a depiction of the campaign that paints a dedicated, cohesive team as mercenaries with questionable motives who lacked a loyalty to a candidate described as ‘imperial’ and removed from the campaign,” she wrote. “That’s just not the campaign, the staff or the candidate I was in the trenches with for 18 months.”
The Shattered series is still in its embryonic stage: Although TriStar Television, a division of Sony Pictures, and Davis Entertainment have made a deal to produce the series, no network is attached. There’s also no word on who will write the series, or if said writer(s) will take the criticisms of Clinton’s campaign staffers to heart in adapting the book for the screen.