TORONTO — More than two million Canadians tuned in this week to Little Mosque on the Prairie, the new CBC comedy about a Muslim community in a rural town that has been the subject of worldwide attention.
The figure — 2.1 million — is a huge one for a Canadian television show. Corner Gas, CTV’s big sitcom hit and one of the country’s highest-rated shows, routinely pulls in just over a million a week.
Kirstine Layfield, director of network programming for public broadcaster, says it appears Little Mosque won its time slot, even besting a brand-new episode of the red-hot medical drama House.
She says the CBC is “ecstatic and thrilled” by the numbers.
Layfield says of the hundreds of people who phoned the CBC on Tuesday night to weigh in on the show, the vast majority of them were positive.
Little Mosque has been getting international buzz for weeks, with everyone from the BBC to CNN running items on the comedy by Muslim film-maker Zarqa Nawaz.
Nawaz says the attention is due to the fact that Little Mosque is considered one of the first North American sitcoms to portray Muslims in a humorous light in a post 9-11 world.