In Hollywood there was a major loss this weekend. The writer, director and producer Manny Coto died at the age of 62 at his home in Pasadena, a town near Los Angeles. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in June 2022 and had spent the last thirteen months trying to overcome the disease. Who was Manny Coto and why was he a relevant figure on contemporary television?
As the Deadline portal reports, Coto was born in Havana although his mother raised him in Orlando after fleeing the Fidel Castro regime. And, after using his father’s camera to shoot home horror movies with his friends, he decided to dedicate himself professionally to audiovisuals. In 1983 he was already in Los Angeles working in the advertising sector and, after convincing Tippi Hedren to participate in a personal project of his, Twist, he entered the American Film Institute.
It was precisely this Twist that gave him his first relevant project on television. In Alfred Hitchcock Presents he wrote the third season episode of the same name about a rich man who, after discovering that his wife is dying, plans what his future with his mistress will be like. The problem is that, as its title indicates, the script reserves one turn after another and another. The genre marked his beginnings: he wrote an episode of Tales from the Crypt in 1991, the one entitled Morning mess, and two of Beyond the Limit in 1995, If these walls could talk and The voice of reason.
And, after creating the science fiction series Odyssey 5 that kept him busy between 2002 and 2003 and writing for Star Trek Enterprise between 2003 and 2005, where he served as showrunner in the fourth season, Coto’s best professional period arrived, or at least his works for which he became on the front line of American television. This is due to his work on 24, where he spent four seasons (2006-2010), worked as a writer and producer, wrote a total of 27 episodes and won the Emmy for best drama series.
He was also nominated for an Emmy for best drama series for Dexter, in which he was involved as a writer and producer from its fifth season until its denouement. And, after closing the story of the psychopath Dexter Morgan, he returned to the 24 universe: first with 24: Live Another Day (2014), which he wrote, and then with 24: Legacy (2016), where he was the creator with Corey Hawkins taking the lead. relief of Kiefer Sutherland.
In 2020 he wrote his second series as creator, Next, which was possibly too visionary: with John Slattery in the lead role, he imagined what would happen if an artificial intelligence got out of hand to humans. It was canceled after one season. And in recent years he joined Ryan Murphy’s factory as a writer and executive producer of American horror story in three seasons (Apocalypse, Double feature and NYC) and also of American horror stories.
“Manny was an incredibly beloved member of 20th Television and the FX family for almost two decades,” they explained from the production company for which he had worked on 24 or AHS, where they consider him “brilliantly creative with deep intellectual curiosity.”
“If we had a fifth season of Enterprise, Manny Coto would have taken it to levels beyond my imagination. He was an extraordinarily talented screenwriter and a good friend. How sad”, lamented Rick Berman, producer of Star Trek franchise titles such as The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine or the Enterprise in which Coto was involved.
And it is that his role could always be behind the cameras and perhaps the fictions he created such as Odyssey 5 or Next had the bad luck of being canceled prematurely, but he was a key creative on television in the last quarter of a century.
