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FX's Rescue Me, facing an extra-long break because of the writers' strike, is turning to an unusual tactic to keep the fire burning for fans: a series of weekly five-minute segments, dubbed "minisodes," that will air Tuesdays at 10 ET/PT starting next week.

The darkly comic series about NYC firefighters, starring Denis Leary, last aired in September. New episodes won't arrive until April, an eternity in TV, because of production delays and scheduling concerns.

"You're looking at 19 months off the air, which is technically cancellation, I believe," says Peter Tolan, who writes and produces the series with Leary. "We felt there was some risk there, and the best way to hedge our bets is to give us some face time with our audience so they don't drift away."

FX chief John Landgraf, who worried Rescue fans will "forget it exists," came up with the idea. And on the bright side, when full episodes finally return, fans will get 22, up from 13 in previous seasons.

The minisodes don't connect to the new season, but they do answer fan calls for more comedy. "They said, 'We miss the guys talking in the kitchen about sex, their lives, and foolishness in the (fire) house,' " Tolan says.

"One involves a flashback that explains something that goes all the way back to the beginning of the series, and another is a dream sequence tied into Tommy's psyche," Leary says of his character, Tommy Gavin. "It starts out as a really sexy dream and ends up as a nightmare."

Tolan hopes they help erase a subpar fourth season: "The story choices we made took us away from our main guys. It was sort of treading water."

FX doesn't expect millions of viewers to tune in for five minutes a week, so it's also streaming the minisodes on several sites, including YouTube, Hulu and Crackle. "I bet more people will watch these things on the Internet," Landgraf says.

When Season 5 finally arrives, it will "pick up where Tommy left off emotionally, with the death of his father (Charles Durning) and the fact that everyone else is in grief about it, but he's not," Leary says.

Also new: Karina Lombard as a French journalist researching a book on 9/11, "and that's sort of a thorn in everybody's side."

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New episodes won't arrive until April, an eternity in TV, because of production delays and scheduling concerns.

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