Roberto Patino

Roberto Patino is a television writer and producer whose most prominent recent project is DMZ, HBO Max’s four-part limited-series adaptation of Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli’s DC/Vertigo comic. Patino developed the screen version and served as its showrunner and executive producer; Ava DuVernay and her ARRAY Filmworks were also executive producers. Released in 2022, the series turns the comic’s near-future American civil-war setting into a story centered on Alma Ortega, a medic played by Rosario Dawson. Alma enters a militarily sealed-off Manhattan, now a demilitarized zone, while searching for the son from whom she was separated during the conflict. DMZ gave Patino a chance to lead an adaptation with an unusually compressed format: four episodes rather than an open-ended season. Its cast also includes Benjamin Bratt as Parco Delgado, the leader of one of the competing factions in the DMZ; Hoon Lee as Wilson Lin; Freddy Miyares as Skel; and Jordan Preston as Odi. The programme stages its political conflict within a Manhattan cut off from the United States, rather than treating the disaster merely as background. Before DMZ, Patino built a substantial record in serialized drama. He worked as a writer and producer on FX’s Sons of Anarchy, Kurt Sutter’s motorcycle-club drama set around the fictional California town of Charming. He later joined HBO’s science-fiction drama Westworld as a writer and producer. Patino wrote “Akane No Mai,” the second season’s fifth episode, which moves much of the action to Shogunworld, a park modeled on Edo-period Japan. There Maeve Millay encounters Akane, played by Rinko Kikuchi, and recognizes a parallel between Akane’s bond with Sakura and Maeve’s own determination to protect her daughter. Patino also worked as a writer and producer on NBC’s Prime Suspect, the 2011 American adaptation of Lynda La Plante’s British police drama. The series cast Maria Bello as New York City homicide detective Jane Timoney. Earlier, he wrote for A&E’s The Cleaner, starring Benjamin Bratt as William Banks, a former addict who intervenes in other people’s addictions. Across these credits, Patino has moved between crime drama, speculative fiction, and comic-book adaptation, but his documented work is rooted in named series, episodes, and characters rather than a single genre. His credits place him alongside Kurt Sutter, Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and Ava DuVernay in major television productions.