R.I.P. Manny Coto 1961 - 2023

Emmy Award winning Star Trek: Enterprise producer Manuel Coto ("Manny") died Sunday July 9 at the age of 62 after a thirteen month battle with pancreatic cancer. He was born on June 10, 1961 in Havana, Cuba. If you consider season 4 of Star Trek: Enterprise to be "the good one", you can thank him. 

He started with the show as writer and co-executive producer in season three and then for the fourth was promoted to executive producer and showrunner. The result was a season that was a love letter to Star Trek finally showing the series full potential with great stories, characterizations and dives into lore. 

Coto said about working on season 4 of Enterprise, “I wanted to tell more complex stories. One of the first things I wanted to do was tell stories in three-episode arcs where we could actually create little min-feature films…. And I wanted to tell more sweeping tales that tied into The Original Series because Enterprise was a prequel and I felt that, at a certain point, the show should begin to tack towards things that we remembered from The Original Series. I thought it would be nice and fun and tremendously rich to explore facets of The Original Series and of the Star Trek universe that were there but had not been fleshed out.” 

After Star Trek, he worked on "24" in all its iterations including winning a writing Emmy in 2006 for his work on the series. Other writing and producing work included Odyssey 5, Dexter, American Horror Stories and more. 

20th Television and FX said in a statement, “Manny was an incredibly beloved member of the 20th Television and FX family for close to two decades. He was brilliantly creative with a deep intellectual curiosity, and his loyalty and friendship touched many. He will be immensely missed by all who were fortunate to have known and worked with him over the years, and our sincere condolences go out to his beautiful family at this most difficult time.” Star Trek: Enterprise creator Brannon Braga wrote "...Manny loved reading genre fiction and he was a master at writing it. I learned so much from Manny and consider myself one of the lucky people who got to know and work with him. I will miss his imagination and generosity and most of all, his laugh. RIP Manny Coto." 

More condolence messages can be found at TrekMovie.com. Oscar-winning screenwriter Brian Helgeland shared his thoughts on his friend that is worth reading. Condolences to his family on their great loss.