Nick at Nite has bought cable TV rights to reruns of “Everybody Hates Chris” for a license fee of between $250,000 and $300,000 an episode.

The show’s distributor, CBS TV Distribution, will also chalk up two minutes within each half-hour run of the series on Nick at Nite throughout the four-year license term. These barter minutes could funnel another $150,000 an episode into the coffers of CBS TV when the reruns begin in September 2009.

CBS TV could pocket as little as $36 million overall (based on the minimum number of 80 “Chris” episodes in four seasons) and as much as $54 million (based on the maximum number of 120 episodes over six seasons).

The significance of such a big dollar yield for a modestly performing comedy on the CW is that “Chris” joins the rare company of sitcoms that will fetch more money from cable TV than from TV syndication in its first cycle. As a general rule, sitcom reruns tend to harvest the most bountiful payday from TV stations market by market.

But when CBS TV Distribution engineered its first syndie deals for “Chris” late last year, Fox-owned stations in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Washington and Houston paid no money in license fees, instead handing the distrib only two minutes an hour to sell to national advertisers.

By contrast, the CBS-owned TV stations in Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta and Miami ponied up a restrained $35,000 a week in license fees for “Chris” on top of the two minutes of advertising time. As with Nick at Nite, the stations will begin multiple-run scheduling of “Chris” in fall 2009.

Scott Koondel, exec veep for CBS TV Distribution, and Cyma Zarghami, president of Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite, the execs who negotiated the deal, declined to talk about financial details.

For Zarghami, the importance of the deal is that “Chris” fits in with Nick at Nite’s two current rerun hits, “The George Lopez Show” and “Home Improvement,” which are piling up the network’s best primetime ratings in a couple of years. In February alone, Nick at Nite grew by a heady 35% in primetime vs. a year earlier.

“All three of these shows are relevant to both kids and their parents,” Zarghami said. She added that the competitive daily syndication run of “Chris” shouldn’t keep people from watching it on Nick at Nite because the network will schedule the show in primetime; most TV stations will play “Chris” in daytime and early evening.

Zarghami said Nick at Nite is also getting “Chris” sooner off the network than any other sitcom in its 23-year history, giving her confidence that the reruns will perform well in the Nielsens.

“Everybody Hates Chris,” co-created by Chris Rock and Ali LeRoi, is a production of CBS Paramount Network TV, Chris Rock Enterprises and 3 Arts Entertainment. Skein’s other exec producers are Michael Rotenberg, Davy Becky and Don Reo.