Reception
Unusual for a Canadian television series, Little Mosque received extensive advance publicity in international media, with stories appearing in The New York Times, the Washington Times and the Houston Chronicle, as well as on CNN, NPR and the BBC
The show premiered on Tuesday, January 9, 2007, at 8:30 p.m. It airs Mondays at 8:00 p.m. (all times half an hour later in Newfoundland). The Monday, January 15 broadcast was a repeat of the pilot.
The series premiere drew an audience of 2.1 million, an exceptionally strong rating for domestic programming in the Canadian television market, and on par with Canadian ratings for popular American series. It was, in fact, the largest audience the CBC had achieved in a decade for an entertainment program. By comparison, Corner Gas, one of the highest-rated Canadian TV shows, attracts just under one and a half million viewers for a typical episode. The second episode, airing against the second night of the much-anticipated season premiere of American Idol in most markets, had 1.2 million viewers, a sharp drop but still a high rating for a Canadian sitcom, and very high for CBC Television, which has had trouble garnering large audiences for its scripted programming in recent years.
At the end of the show's season on March 7, 2007, the show attracted 1.1 million viewers, or an average of 1.2 million for the season. CBC Television renewed the show for a second season consisting of 20 episodes, which began airing on October 3, 2007, and continued to attract an average of one million viewers per episode.
CBC renewed the show for a third season on March 7, 2008. Season three premiered on CBC Television October 1, 2008. In its third season ratings declined and as of December 2008 it was attracting a quarter of its original audience. In its fourth season ratings declined further and as of December 2009 it was drawing 420,000 viewers a week, or twenty percent of its original audience.
On February 11, 2011, it was announced that CBC had renewed the series for a sixth and final season. This season began airing on CBC on January 9, 2012 and concluded on April 2, 2012.
Read more about this topic: Little Mosque On The Prairie
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)