Bill Lawrence made Blake McCormick a promise.

Blake McCormick (left), a University alumni, has been working behind-the-scenes “Cougar Town,” ABC's sitcom, for two years as a writer. The job comes as the next in a line of a series of gigs around L.A. Courtesy Blake McCormick

There was a meeting, six years ago, about a TV show. The show went nowhere, but the meeting went very well.

And McCormick — a 2000 graduate from the University who had already been in L.A. a few years, selling scripts and hopping around the sets of “Futurama” and “The X-Files” — wasn’t the only one who thought so.

Afterward, Lawrence said, “I promise I’m going to hire you one day,” McCormick said.

And he did.

It was, in one way, the fulfillment of a sort of dream: Lawrence, who has created the TV shows “Scrubs” and “Spin City,” among others, had become like a hero to McCormick.

But being offered a job was nothing quite new to the 20-something writer who “always knew” that he wanted to work in film and television.

After six or seven months spent working “many, many jobs” around L.A., including at restaurants and around, McCormick landed as a production assistant on the set of Fox’s 31st-century-set animated series.

From there, the course of his career began to zig — and then zag.

McCormick moved on from “Futurama” to actual writing, once going “to work on a pilot you’ve never heard of because it didn’t go anywhere,” and then later going solo on a script, which he sold in 2004.

The script, for a comedy film about three aimless friends who reappear in the life of their fourth, not-aimless, buddy, never got made — which was “kind of heartbreaking,” McCormick said, but a good lesson nonetheless.

Selling the script was also a good way to make money, and he made enough of it from that deal to start writing full-time.

And he did.

That’s what McCormick had been doing, in the years between his meeting with Lawrence and the job offer that came out of it: Fox Television Studios had staffed him on one of its productions, sending him somewhere on the strength of that go-nowhere script he sold.

Starting in 2006, McCormick spent three years on “King of the Hill,” which he loved even before he got to spend a few years writing for its final seasons.

Then, with the end of the show, a sudden stop.

“Because I had hoped to go straight from ‘King of the Hill’ to my next show and that didn’t happen,” McCormick said.

Then, with one offer two years ago, a stop to the stop.

McCormick came to “Cougar Town” after its first season — an important distinction, because it meant he “wasn’t there for some of the growing pains,” he said, that Lawrence’s wine-drenched cul-de-sac comedy went through.

And yet, two years after avoiding those first-year pains, and long after shirking his “new guy” label in the writers’ room, McCormick has been on-set for another set of difficulties altogether.

When “Cougar Town” ended its second season last May, the show went away — and then didn’t come back.

Or, at least, not back on the air.

Behind the scenes, Lawrence and his production team, including McCormick, worked to finish writing and shooting a third season that had yet to see the light of a screen — or a schedule.

The process was “fascinating and nerve-wracking and unlike anything I would imagine from a writing perspective,” McCormick said.

Lawrence had other words for it, in a guest column he wrote for Entertainment Weekly last November: “[H]ow does it feel to be a midseason replacement?” he wrote, “Well, since I’ve only written 692 words so far: It sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks, sucks.”

It didn’t just suck, though: with “Cougar Town” held indeterminately by the network, floating without a return date for the spring, the sucking became an opportunity, as Lawrence later launched what the Associated Press called “guerrilla warfare,” according to a January article.

The war, as it turned out, was waged in screening rooms and conference tables with members of the show’s cast and crew holding screenings across the country — in Atlanta, Chicago and San Diego, among others.

The cast even made the trip to Pasadena to attend a party thrown by the show’s creators for TV critics, in an effort to further the promotion and increase the hype.

The goal was simple.

“If I can turn out the same audience that enjoys the show for the first two years, this show will be on for six or seven years,” Lawrence told Entertainment Weekly in January. “But it’s also an experiment.”

And as an experiment, the screenings have had a few surprises.

When McCormick’s turn came to host one, not all went as planned.

“It was a nightmare … at first,” he said.

And that’s because actress Busy Phillips, who co-stars on the show, was delayed in her co-hosting duties, held up in-transit.

McCormick, forced to go at it alone, found the audience of 150 people held more than just fans.

Some of them, he said, had come from Twitter, having corresponded with Lawrence via tweet or social network.

“And here I am, meeting those people face-to-face,” McCormick said.

To fill time, he chatted with the attendees and grew comfortable.

After a few hours, Phillips arrived; the night and its screening continued and was a success.

Afterward, more success: ABC announced a Feb. 14 return date for “Cougar Town.”

The only if that remains — for the cast and crew and for McCormick, who’s learned from L.A. to “be thankful for work when you can get it” — is who.

“At the end of the day,” McCormick said, “all that matters is, ‘Are people going to watch you?’”