Wolf Hall Producer to Develop Financial Conspiracy Exposé

Playground, the producer of such dramas as Wolf Hall, has optioned the rights to David Enrich’s new narrative nonfiction book The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History.

Enrich won the 2016 Gerald Loeb award for his series of Wall Street Journal articles “The Unraveling of Tom Hayes,” about a brilliant but troubled British trader who was convicted and imprisoned for his involvement in Libor-fixing, one of the largest financial scams in history. The Spider Network expands on those articles with exclusive access to Hayes and his family, giving a tell-all account of the characters at the center of the scandal.

The project will be shepherded by Scott Huff, Playground’s senior VP of development and production, and Elyse Dolbec, the company’s director of development and production, in Playground’s U.S. office.

“The Spider Network is a globe-trotting financial exposé in the vein of Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short, but with an enigmatic central character in banker Tom Hayes,” said Huff. “David Enrich’s book is a thrilling account of the Libor scandal and the man who took the fall for it that asks probing questions about who really pays the price for misconduct in a system that’s too big to fail.”