Glenn Kessler writes thrillers that run forwards and backwards at once, so that the telling matters more than what happens. In Damages the trick gave us thirteen hours we would hand to anyone; over five seasons it became the only trick.
Fi1m perspective
A young woman half-dressed under a raincoat, covered in someone's blood, is the first thing Damages (2007) gives us, minutes before it shows the same woman being hired out of law school by Patty Hewes. Glenn Kessler, who created the series with his brother Todd A. Kessler and Daniel Zelman, treats the gap between those two shots as the main character. Every episode of the first season moves between the hiring and the ruin, and the suspense is in watching them close on each other. It is a legal thriller in which almost nothing happens in a courtroom.
Kessler came to television from the stage, as a playwright and an actor, and the actor's habits show. His first television writing was on Robbery Homicide Division (2002), then Damages, which ran until 2012 and on which he wrote dozens of episodes, directed four and took a small acting part. He directed episodes while running the show and writing it. Of the writing he has said: "It isn’t so much that the lines need to be hit as written. There’s a jazz element to it." He brings improvisation onto the set, and in Glenn Close he found an actor who could turn that licence into the most frightening lawyer we have seen on television. Rose Byrne's Ellen has the harder job, being the one who does not yet know what we know, and she is a different woman depending on which timeline we are in.
We admit the raincoat got us. It is one cut, from a hopeful graduate to a bloodied one, and it made us sit forward before the show had earned it, because it told us the ruin was certain and the only question was the route. That is Kessler's method in a sentence: the destination first, the map later.
The same three men made Bloodline (2015), another thriller of family loyalty and betrayal told out of sequence, which ran three seasons. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here; the method plainly travelled with them. The trouble with the method is in our review of Damages: over five seasons the trick wears thin, because a structure this elaborate promises that every piece will lock, and the later pieces lock less cleanly each time. A flash-forward only works if we believe the writer knows where it leads, and by the fifth season we were not sure.
His more recent writing credits are The Last Frontier (2025) and Memory of a Killer (2026). Watch the first thirteen hours of Damages and then decide for yourself whether to go on. We went on, and were glad we had, though not for all of it.
Biography
Glenn Kessler is an American screenwriter, television producer, director and actor. Born in Michigan in 1970, he graduated from Harvard University and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Acting Program. He began his career as a playwright and actor in film, television and on stage before moving into television writing.
Kessler co-created the FX series Damages (2007–2012) with his brother Todd A. Kessler and Daniel Zelman. He served as executive producer and writer on the series, directed several episodes and appeared in the recurring role of FBI agent L.J. Werner. The trio later created the Netflix series Bloodline (2015–2017). Kessler has received Emmy nominations for his work on Damages.
