Sam Pavich accumulated plenty of experience as an assistant throughout four years in the Echo Lake Entertainment offices before getting staffed as a writer's assistant on 4400 last March.

According to Pavich, working in management as someone who aspires to write is beneficial.

"It really helped me just to kind of learn the business side before getting into it, and then working on the creative part of it on my own," she said.

Pavich started at Echo Lake as an intern through a college program, where she majored in acting, though her focus landed on writing following an exploration of different ways to tell a story.

"I've been writing since I was like, 5 years old. It's always been something I wanted to do, but I didn't really fall into wanting to pursue screenwriting specifically until I moved out [to Los Angeles]. And part of it was just something I was kind of exploring," she said.

Pavich credits her internship at Echo Lake as the experience that convinced her to pursue writing.

"I was reading so many scripts and learning how writers get representation, and it started to seem like 'okay, this is like, maybe something that I could kind of do,'" she said.

"It kind of surprised me, too, that in some ways — especially TV writing — there is kind of like, a track you can follow as far as, you know, getting that first assistant job as like, a showrunner’s assistant, a writer's assistant, and then working your way up through the ranks."

That doesn't mean it isn't competitive, Pavich notes, though she says she didn't expect her career to have the linear nature that it has had so far.

"For someone who, you know, is a little Type A and always liked school ... I think it also reassured my parents a little bit to be like, 'yeah, there's a way you can kind of break in and it's not just, you know, "hope for something to happen" and all that,'" she said, laughing.

Her co-workers at Echo Lake also helped her with that breaking-in process. Specifically, she says her peers were willing to read her writing samples, which helped her earn representation. 

"It's kind of hard sometimes when you don't want to go into management and you're working at a management company because, you know, a lot of times they want people who can move up through their ranks, which I think I did because I think I had about 10 different jobs while I worked there," she laughed.

"But everyone was really supportive of me wanting to write, which was awesome."

That supportive environment was also what led to Pavich getting staffed on 4400 after her name and script were passed through the Echo Lake manager-client pipeline. Since then, the support has continued on set.

"I've been with [4400] for the whole season and since this is the first season, there was a lot of like, putting pieces together and figuring out exactly how the whole thing worked. And for me, it would have been my first TV show. I had so much to learn," she said.

"But I will say, both of my bosses — because there're two showrunners — they’re both amazing and they were always so willing to answer my questions. Or sometimes they'd be talking about how processes on the show would work and they'd be like, ‘Wait, Sam, do you know what that is? Because if not, we'll run you through the whole thing and explain why it is that we're having this meeting.’ They’ve both been super awesome."

While Pavich says most of her job is scheduling and keeping track of various tasks for the showrunners, she also gets to sit in the room every day, which is one of the best things to come out of the recent work-from-home shift.

"All four of us on the support staff are strongly encouraged to participate and bring our ideas in. And I really felt too like our ideas were valued, and never felt weird or like someone was gonna overlook our ideas just because we weren't actually on the staff," she said.

"Everyone in the room — all the writers included — was just super awesome and supportive. And we even got to write on a couple of things as well."

As for her personal brand of writing, Pavich describes it as "cringey comedy."

"I really like putting characters in like, horribly awkward situations, which are usually based on things that have actually happened to me. And then I just sort of exaggerate them a bit," she said.

"But yeah, so cringey humor, dark humor. Coming-of-age stories are something I feel like I end up gravitating toward a lot — but also in what has become kind of popular — in that mid-to-late-twenties/early thirties coming-of-age. So I feel like I end up writing a lot of that stuff, which then 4400 is a sci-fi show, but it's really character-based. So there were certain things that I felt like I could contribute to with that."

With the possibility of season two of 4400 on the horizon, Pavich’s managers are keeping their eyes open for other staffing opportunities, and she’s finished writing a dark comedy feature that’s making the rounds.

Her golden nugget of advice, which she learned from both sides of the trenches, is that "networking really means you're just going to make friends and get to know people as you're working on stuff. And the people that you genuinely feel like you have a connection with — that it's not just a constant weird following-up just for networking reasons, but you actually genuinely have reasons to contact them because you like them as people and as friends — those are the people who are gonna, you know, help you out."

Growing and moving up together is part of that, she says, and this realization has changed her perspective entirely.

"Networking used to really freak me out and felt like this big thing. But now, I'm like, 'no, I just have cool people that I like working with and, you know, we're all going to help each other.'"

Cheers to that, Sam!