Tonight Canadian viewers finally get to listen to The Listener, a home-grown "soft sci-fi" series that already has aired in many countries around the world.

The Listener makes its Canadian debut tonight on CTV and Space, with the second episode airing tomorrow on those same networks. NBC, which has purchased The Listener for broadcast in the United States, will air the first two episodes back-to-back tomorrow night.

"When (NBC co-chairman) Ben Silverman picked up the show, over a year ago now, Ben right away said, 'I want this show to go on in June '09, I believe it's a summer show,' " said executive producer Christina Jennings. "So right then, we knew.

"But when we brought (distributor) Fox International into the mix, they really didn't want to wait. They usually want to launch a series off the success in North America, so they had to launch a massive campaign internationally.

"We saw billboards in Bogota and Rome and Tokyo. They couldn't say, 'It's a successful series that has been on NBC and CTV.' They had to create it themselves. So they took a risk that paid off, thank goodness."

Indeed, The Listener has been largely well-received by foreign audiences. The series stars Craig Olejnik as Toby Logan, a 25-year-old paramedic in Toronto who happens to be a telepath.

Toronto is front-and-centre in The Listener, to the point that it almost feels as if the city is a character in the show.

"Ivan Fecan, the head of CTV, was determined that Toronto be a character," Jennings said. "We weren't going to step in for anybody else, we were going to be ourselves.

"And I'll never forget, I went down to have the big meeting with NBC, there must have been 40 people around the boardroom table, and I said to everyone, 'You've never had a chance to really see Toronto because everything unique about our city, we have to hide.'

"People don't realize, we have streetcars, we have an island off the foot of our city where people live, we have ferries, I went on and on. And each episode, we actually tried to find another community. It is Toronto, it truly is."

Jennings said allowing Toronto to be Toronto has not been a problem in the global market. Quite the contrary, actually.

"Internationally, a lot of people have come back and made a comment about how they didn't realize Toronto was as beautiful a city as it is, because no one ever gets to see it," Jennings said. "It was really fun to do."

Besides Olejnik, The Listener also stars Colm Feore, Lisa Marcos, Ennis Esmer and Mylene Dinh-Robic.

Initially, The Listener was supposed to debut in both Canada and the United States tomorrow, but NBC threw a curve at virtually the last minute by scheduling back-to-back episodes. Thus, rather than falling an episode behind on its own show, CTV quickly decided to air the first episode tonight and the second episode tomorrow.

Moving forward, the plan is to air The Listener in both countries, in simulcast, on Thursdays.