Todd A. Kessler writes thrillers that begin at the end and work backwards, and when the trick is new, as in the first season of Damages, it is hard to look away. Repeated across seasons and series, it starts to look like a habit.
Fi1m perspective
Minutes into the pilot of Damages (2007), Rose Byrne's Ellen Parsons is out on the street half-dressed under a raincoat and covered in someone's blood, and we have no idea whose. We have only just watched her get hired. The rest of the first season lives between those two points, the job offer and the ruin, and every episode edges closer to both. Kessler and his co-creators, his brother Glenn Kessler and Daniel Zelman, treat that structure as the main character. Glenn Close's Patty Hewes is the other one, the most frightening lawyer we have seen on television, and she works partly because the programme keeps us half a step behind her.
He came to it from the theatre, as a playwright working with David Rabe, before Spike Lee hired him as a screenwriter. Then came The Sopranos (1999), where he wrote across the second and third seasons and shares the credit with David Chase on the second-season finale, 'Funhouse'. Our review of that series does not single him out, and we will not pretend to know which lines were his. Damages followed in 2007, Bloodline in 2015 with the same two partners, and The New Look in 2024, a biographical drama, which we have not reviewed.
The method has a price. Told forwards and backwards at once, a story can only close on a secret, so each new season needs a fresh body and a fresh question hanging over it, and by the fifth year of Damages the trick had worn thin. Bloodline, which Kessler said was meant to 'dig into the earth that is family', moved the same shape from a law firm to a family; we have not reviewed it and will not judge it here. But we will own this: the first thirteen hours of Damages gave us a dread we did not expect from a legal drama, and it came from Kessler's refusal to tell us how much Ellen knows, so that Byrne can play her, for a whole season, as victim, accomplice or both.
He also appears in Damages himself, as Perry the doorman, a small recurring part he has kept. It suits him: the man at the door who sees everyone come and go and says nothing about it. Start with that first season, and if the mechanism begins to show in the second, you have our permission to stop.
Biography
Todd A. Kessler is an American screenwriter, playwright, television producer and director. He began his career as a playwright working with David Rabe before moving into film and television. He wrote and produced episodes for the second and third seasons of the HBO series The Sopranos (2000–2001), including co-writing the season two finale Funhouse with David Chase.
Kessler is the co-creator, head writer and executive producer of the FX series Damages (2007–2012), which he developed with his brother Glenn Kessler and Daniel Zelman. He later created the Netflix series Bloodline (2015–2017) and has worked on The New Look (2024). He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and has received multiple Primetime Emmy Award nominations.
