West Wing on Region 2 DVD
My wife and I are huge fans of The West Wing television series. We don’t really watch it on the network, because we got in the game kind of late and it we didn’t want to see the episodes out of sequence. So we’ve been watching them on DVD from NetFlix. So far, they only have Seasons One and Two out (they’re showing Season Six right now). We’ve been waiting with bated breath for the rest of the seasons, with the hope that we might be able to eventually catch up. Unfortunately, they seem to be on an annual release schedule for them.
Then, one day I was in Sainsbury’s and I saw that they had Season Four on a shelf for sale! What the hell? It’s an American show from an American network, about the American government, but you can get it on DVD in the UK two years earlier than you can in the US. Bizarre… You would think that it might just be a simple matter of buying them here, but of course you can’t play European DVD’s in US players because the discs have different encodings, theoretically to address piracy, but obviously it allows them to have different release and marketing schedules as well. What I need to do is find myself a region-free DVD player and be done with this problem altogether. In the meantime, enjoy staring at this link to a Season 4 DVD set that won’t play in your American DVD player. At least you can take solace in the fact that Season Three came out last Tuesday.