TORONTO — It helps to know people in high places — and for Canadian indie band Tokyo Police Club, having a friend in Hollywood has meant being name-dropped on one of TV’s biggest prime-time shows and getting to play a song for an audience of millions.

The band’s name was slipped into dialogue in a recent episode of “Desperate Housewives” (ABC, CTV), and they’re now set to appear and perform on Sunday’s episode of the Emmy-winning show.

The series has typically drawn audiences of around 15 million viewers in the U.S. this season, but the band is under no illusions that this could be their big break, keyboard player Graham Wright said in a recent interview.

“Whether or not the target demographic of ’Desperate Housewives’ is going to be interested in Tokyo Police Club is not something I could answer. I would guess we’re probably not going to win over a whole bunch of new fans — but that was never the point,” Wright said.

“It’s just something that’s really cool and really awesome and exciting for us to do. We’ve already got what we wanted out of it.”

Wright can’t reveal too much about their roles on the show, but he will say that they compete in a battle of the bands contest against a group started by the men of Wisteria Lane.

Tokyo Police Club is “the young hotshot band that’s there to make them feel old and inadequate,” Wright said.

Two of the band’s members also have lines in the episode.

Sadly, Wright said, only the men were on set when the band did its shoot, so they didn’t get to mingle with the female stars of the show.

“I walked past Eva Longoria at one point but I didn’t say hi. You know how it is, they probably had better things to do than talk to us,” he said.

The prime-time TV appearance will mark the end of the biggest year in the Newmarket, Ont., band’s short career thus far.

Tokyo Police Club built up major buzz on the strength of two EPs released in 2007, and last April released their first full-length album, “Elephant Shell.”

This fall the band toured across North America as openers for Weezer.

“This Weezer tour was sort of the last big thing we’re doing this year, and it’s definitely the biggest thing we’ve done,” Wright said.

“And then for the ’Desperate Housewives’ thing to sort of randomly happen in the middle of that as well just adds to the whole craziness of this month, which is the craziest part of a crazy year,” said Wright, noting a writer on the show is a friend of the band.

He said the band now intends to take it easy for a while and has no immediate plans to start working on a followup album.

But they are playing a few shows next month with Metric, the Dears, Sebastien Grainger and the Mountains, and DJ Mike Relm for the Jingle Bell Rock tour that has dates scheduled in Toronto, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver.