What happens when your imported product dries up, and your domestic product has effectively died on the vine?

Media people in the US have been discussing for a few weeks some of the possible negative effects that a WGA strike might have on American television production, and the knock-on effects for broadcasting in the US.

What I'm wondering is what happens to telly in this country... seeing as how the private OTA networks have already abdicated their weekday content and scheduling to the Americans (and collect a pretty penny from Canadian corporate advertisers via simultaneous substitution* ), what happens when that content is no longer there as promised?

Do you, as CTV or Global, simply suck it up from NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox et al and show whatever is replacing your original content? What if another Canadian network has already pledged it? (Crap. I can't find that article I saw online discussing this possibility.)

OK. There are bound to be insurance provisions in the private broadcasters' contracts with the advertisers and agencies to cover this eventuality. But still. You're CTV and Global. You have one major domestic product each, both of them half-hour sitcoms. A drama you were sharing with ABC Family has been put down (Falcon Beach), another one (Whistler) appears to be in limbo, and nothing seems to be in the pipeline.

What do you do?

Do you start raiding your other properties? In this case, cable specialty channels? NBC is currently rumoured to be considering exactly this for Battlestar Galactica, perhaps taking old episodes from the SciFi channel and showing them over the main network. Which may work. However, when they showed the miniseries a few years ago, ratings for the network tanked pretty badly (Unfortunately, as it is my favourite show).

For CTVglobemedia this is now a moot point as they now own all the parts of the puzzle - CityTV shows S2 reruns from Space currently; conceivably they could do the same with the main network ... but what does Global do with replacing Bionic Woman, or Journeyman, or Life?

Do the US networks reimburse Canadian networks at any point?


* I am highly amused to discover that US cable providers do the same to Canadian content shown down south as well: see the article on syndication exclusivity, also via Wikipedia. For more information on the US side of things, see Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood.