Reruns to air the week of December 23-27

I think cancelling the tapings *was* the contingency plan. Substitute hosts in all of television used to be the norm for quite a while in TV and they sorta died off until recently. At first, in the 50's, it was done out of necessity as programs were live and still had to go on. It continued into the 70s and 80s, probably due to the cost of videotape. Johnny Carson used to have a permanent guest host so he could have a shorter work week. Then the 90's rolled around, and things changed once Carson retired. It became standard practice for the most part to just cancel tapings if people weren't around. Some people still used them (Letterman comes to mind), and of course, they were needed in news since news is still produced live. I don't know if Price had a contingency for Bob Barker going down long term, but short term the plan was just to cancel tapings. Password Plus didn't have contingency for Allen Ludden. When Ludden found out about his cancer, they had to scramble to call Bill Cullen in because they had less than three weeks of episodes filmed when Allen was rushed to surgery.

And for the last 30 years, it's worked out for them. Any tapings that needed to be missed by Pat, Vanna, or Alex were simply cancelled and shifted around. Usually with a little more notice than Pat's, but still the same. If this had happened after the Secret Santa tapings, they would've avoided all this havoc shifted around the tapings that were supposed to happen two weeks ago and catch up and probably be okay in time for these episodes.