Next Gen 2010: Hollywood's Young Guns

It's no surprise that Harvard graduate Cassidy landed in the television business: She spent her childhood moving from market to market with her TV station-managing father. But two college internships in summer 1997 -- one reading scripts at Richard Donner's company and the other stuck in an office on a feature at Warner Bros. Animation -- made her career choice clear. "I liked working more on the creative side with material -- directly," she says. These days, Cassidy makes that dream come true working on Mixed Signals (adapted from the Israeli dramedy Traffic Light) and has brought aboard in-demand writers like Jhoni Marchinko and Liz Astrof while also serving as point person on deals with the Chernin Co. and Gary Janetti. With a mom who works at Williams-Sonoma, Cassidy gets lots of interesting kitchen paraphernalia and says, "I watch a lot of The Barefoot Contessa, and I can make a good lasagna."