On Tuesday night, FX ran a five-minute "minisode" of its veteran summer series Rescue Me, a strategy it cooked up due to the show's lengthy absence. The fourth season ended last September, but instead of returning this June as it did in June 2007, Rescue Me, which is expanding to a 22-episode season rather than the usual 13, will not come back in full until early 2009. FX clearly believes that having the show out of sight for over a year could lead to it going out of mind for its fan base.

The main reason for the long offseason for Rescue Me is the writers' strike, which covered the three month period during which most of Season Five was to be penned. A good many other programs were disrupted in a similar way: either their 2007-08 seasons were cut short and never revived; or, as was the case with several cable programs, the strike interrupted planning for a new season. The result was the same, however: viewers accustomed to a certain length of time between new episodes of their favorite shows have seen that predictable schedule upset.

The networks in particular are in uncharted waters here, since their traditional programming philosophy has been to run 22 to 24 episodes from September through May, with repeats during times such as the holidays, March and April. Cable channels have tended to go with a different philosophy: fewer episodes in a season (usually 10 to 13), but all of them run in a row with no repeats or weeks off. Fans of these cable series have become accustomed to this and rarely complain, but it's also true that no cable series gets ratings that approach the highest-rated scripted programs on the broadcast networks.

What the writers' strike ended up doing was turning many network shows into virtual cable shows, in terms of how long their most recent seasons were and how much time will pass before they are seen again. Take a series like ABC's Dirty Sexy Money. Because of the strike, its first season was a cable-like 10 episodes in an 11-week stretch. But its last new episode ran on December 5, 2007 and the series will not return until the fall. Such a long gap between new episodes, which would not seem a big deal for fans of a show like Army Wives, is not what network viewers are used to. Will the audience return to Dirty Sexy Money, whose ratings were only fair to begin with?

The same questions will be asked of other series whose gap between new episodes will be longer than the network standard of four months or the cable standard of eight or nine months. These include NBC's Chuck and Life, ABC's Private Practice and Pushing Daisies, Heroes (which was deemed too serialized and special effects-dependent to go back into production once the strike ended), the FX series Damages (whose first season ended in October and won't be back until early 2009), and the HBO shows Big Love and Flight of the Conchords, which both will have been gone for going on two years before they are seen again.

No show will be away longer than 24, which unlike the other long-gone network series won't be back in the fall, but in January as usual (although a Jack Bauer movie will air as a special in November). 24 at least has the advantage of familiarity and thus may not be as vulnerable as a series like Dirty Sexy Money. But even veteran hits can suffer if they have been away for too long. An example is The Sopranos, whose numbers slid as the gaps between its seasons began to lengthen (it was off the air completely during the calendar years 2003 and 2005). The television habit is hard for many to break, but attachment to individual series may not be as strong.

With more channels out there than every year, it's not hard to find never before seen entertainment on television even during traditional dead spots on the calendar (and late June qualifies). One of the results of this is that viewers have become less willing to tolerate repeats, and most networks now dispense with them completely in the case of any program that has a serialized quality. And even without the necessity imposed by a strike, some network shows were already moving towards more of a cable-like scheduling pattern. Lost is the major example here, with ABC holding it back until midseason for the last two years in order to allow it to build up uninterrupted momentum, a la 24. And Fox has essentially turned Prison Break and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles into cable shows, giving them 13 weeks during this coming fall and benching them for the winter and spring.

The best guess is that any series that has been gone for over a year is going to have its work cut out winning its old audience back and expanding to a new audience. And if there's a Screen Actors Guild strike--well, all bets would be off.

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