Our Turn by Kirstine; Stewart Read Free Book Online

couldn’t afford to wait until my second season on the job to demonstrate that success was possible. The network needed an almost instant hit to quiet the naysayers and lift the gloom. They had to see that we had the goods to create a smart hit—and all I had to do was my job, which was to exercise my influence to make that happen, starting with spreading the word.
    In the not too distant past, one of the tried-and-true ways to let people know about a new program was to promote it during peak hours, and preferably during a show with a massive audience. At the time, the only show that captured a million viewers on a weekly basis was Hockey Night in Canada, an American hockey blogger once dubbed this country’s crack cocaine. That made it a powerful vehicle to draw attention to other shows and everybody at the network vied for its promo spots—including me, the boss. I saw it as the perfect launching pad for Little Mosque on the Prairie, but reaction from our sports department was less than warm. They weren’t in favour of donating valuable airtime to promo a show that they thought would never attract the same kind of audience that tuned in to hockey on a Saturday night. Hockey dudes aren’t going to watch a show like Little Mosque , they told me. But hockey wasn’t just for the guys, I said, it was for families—families watch hockey and they’ll watch Little Mosque . Sure, it was a risk, but as I told the sports department, sparing the new show a couple of promos wouldn’t kill them.

    The Little Mosque premiere was scheduled for a Tuesday night in January, and we pulled out all the stops to stoke interest in advance with an extensive promo campaign. This included handing out Christmas cookies at malls, gingerbread women dressed in hijabs. It was, after all, a comedy. (I did turn down the marketing pitch to fly an ultralight plane around the CN Tower trailing a promo written in Arabic: um, what were they thinking?) The show would follow the Rick Mercer Report , which claimed a weekly audience share of close to a million. I asked if Rick, the biggest star on CBC’s primetime schedule, would do a personal throw to the show during his sign-off that night, and he agreed. The National also aired a piece, “Will LMOP save the CBC?” The little show with the strange title also brought CNN, Fox News and a whack of other media calling to hear more. On the day it debuted, the BBC carried an online story on Little Mosque that became the most downloaded article on its website. No pressure …
    The day after Little Mosque ’s first episode aired, I was sitting in a boardroom with a bunch of finance types reviewing budgets when the person in charge of scheduling sent me a message. The daily ratings report card had just come in and her one line of text read “218 OMG.” I was bewildered. After all that effort, only 218,000 people had watched? But then I looked at the message again. Was it actually saying 218,000 or did it mean 2.2 million? I pushed back from the table, opened the boardroom door and down the hall I heard screaming. Of the most glorious kind. They were celebrating. It was 2.2 million. We’d never seen any number like that, and the record stands today.

    People were beyond happy. They felt exhilarated and exonerated. We had a bona fide hit so big that, ironically, the guys from hockey called to ask me for a promo spot for Hockey Night in Canada on Little Mosque for the following week. (When it aired in its regular Wednesday time slot, the same premiere episode garnered another 1.7 million viewers.) I suggested we run a huge ad to announce that the show was, officially, “Canada’s biggest hit.” The staff was hesitant, unaccustomed to the idea of positive attention—and uncomfortable with vying for it. “Ooooh, we don’t know if we should say that …” they told me. But I coaxed them to go along with it, to take a bow and be