It was the one armed man, wasn't it?

Not this time.

Are you watching the English one? Or the Scandinavian one?

Oh, the Scandanavian one, of course.

I hear the American version is pretty good too, but I sort of despise it for being a copy.

Yes, I'm a snob- I admit it.

My Partner said that she couldn't get the Scandinavian one here, but she would like to.

Over here Channel 4 showed the original series- and it started a bit of a vogue for foreign language drama. The great British public turned out to be less averse to reading subtitles than was thought.

Is it really not available in the States- not even on DVD or for download?

No. Believe it or not, we cannot get "everything" here. There is a special DVD player that we would have to get (we are thinking of doing this after we move), then we can probably get it through Amazon UK. But we wouldn't be able to play it without the international player. There are ways around it, of course (there is a way around everything, if one is computer savvy enough), but it takes extra effort, and, somehow, they have managed to block us from streaming it.

We do tend to think of the States as the land of plenty and endless possibility- but I've noticed in the past that some things we Europeans take for granted can be quite hard to get hold of- good cheese for example.

And proper Cadbury chocolate (the stuff they sell here is much lower on whatever that "drug" is that makes chocolate so wonderful... the first time I had Cadbury in England, I practically saw VISIONS!), and real Absinthe... with real thujone... the way it was supposed to be drank. Apparently, Americans are not mature enough to be trusted with thujone. (Of course, there ARE ways of importing the stuff!).