The "Rescue Me" minisodes

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I'm a fan of the FX show "Rescue Me"
I was lukewarm when Dennis Leary mentioned the mini-sodes on his Daily Show visit.
But, for the Rescue Me's particular situation it works really well. First
  • the mini-sodes are actually good!
  • they use characters from the story and tell a little anecdote
  • they were clearly pretty cheap to produce
  • through what seems like a little bit of complicated mess, they're distributing like crazy: YouTube, Crackle (Sony's site), the FX site (powered by Brightcove), Hulu







These do exactly what they're supposed to do
  • new episodes aren't coming till Spring 2009, the fans need something to tide them over and keep the show in their memory: done
  • potentially rope in new fans (short episodes, lower commitment to start watching the show) without freaking out old school media which is loathe to risk potential DVD sales by putting older episodes/clips online: done
Its not completely clear to me how much this is by their own design, and how much is by a bunch of distribution deals, but still more content legally and by design everywhere is a good thing.:)

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