CBC programmer Kirstine Layfield rolled out the network’s winter schedule on Tuesday, unveiling a lineup that includes three new dramas, the daytime lifestyle show Steve & Chris, and the U.S. game shows Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune.

‘We are excited about our winter season lineup of new programs. They offer viewers many choices,’ Layfield told a gathering at CBC headquarters in Toronto on Tuesday, adding the upcoming schedule would be ‘strike-proof.’

‘Who would have thought we’d benefit from a strike — someone else’s strike,’ she added, referring to the Hollywood writers walkout. Layfield said viewership for The Hour was already ‘getting a bit of a lift,’ as viewers, unable to watch shuttered U.S. talkers by Jay Leno and David Letterman, have turned to George Stroumboulopoulos as an alternative.

The network has retooled its Monday night, putting the Olympic look-ahead Countdown to Beijing on at 7:30 p.m. followed by the reality The Week the Women Went at 8 p.m. and documentarian Peter Raymont’s debut drama, The Border, at 9 p.m. where it takes over for Intelligence.

Raymont said the CBC’s international sales arm is already shopping the 13-part drama — about elite Canadian immigration and customs officers, from his White Pine Pictures — to U.S. networks for a possible sale during the current Hollywood writers strike.

‘Those conversations are taking place,’ he said. The series will step into the Intelligence timeslot, while The Week the Women Went takes over for Dragon’s Den. The reality series from Paperny Films is set in Hardisty, AB, where the womenfolk disappear for a week and leave their roughneck husbands and children to cope on their own.

Cal Shumiatcher, executive producer at Paperny, said his 70-member crew and 14 cameras saw an entire town transformed as its close-knit community of 800 Canadians had ‘to cope with life without your mate.’

Tuesdays remain comedy night for the CBC, with new arrival jPod airing at 9 p.m., after This Hour Has 22 Minutes. Wednesdays see the addition of Sophie at 8:30 p.m., sandwiched between Little Mosque on the Prairie and the fifth estate. Sophie is the English-language version of the hit Quebec sitcom Les hauts et les bas de Sophie Paquin.

The other big addition to the winter schedule is MVP, a drama from Screen Door Pictures billed as a ‘keyhole look’ at NHL hockey wives, on Friday nights at 9 p.m.

Steven Sabados and Chris Hyndman, the original frontmen of Designer Guys, will host the daytime addition Steve & Chris.

‘We want to inject a little fabulous into everyone’s lives, in a lighthearted way,’ said Sabados.

Among U.S. shows, the CBC has acquired the Canadian rights to Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune from CBS Paramount International Television after rival CTV decided to give them up. They will start on CBC in fall 2008.

Neither game show airs nationally on CTV — Jeopardy! is not seen in Vancouver and Montreal, and Wheel of Fortune only airs on the A-Channels in Ontario, and CTV Manitoba and CTV Saskatchewan — so gauging their popularity is difficult. Layfield said she will simulcast Jeopardy! nightly as a lead-in to the network’s primetime offerings. Wheel of Fortune will air at 5:30 p.m. nightly to help boost viewership for local supper-hour newscasts.