I had high hopes for the show when I first heard it was coming over to the states, as I loved watching the British version. I remember thinking that I would love to see them bring this one over when that one ended after two series on BBC.

But the cross over was fundamentally flawed unfortunately. It had some great ingredients- O'Mera was pretty good, Gretchen Mol was magnificent, as was Imperioli. But Keitel was a poor substitute for the British Gene Hunt, who is amazing, and the other guy who played the innocent cop was pretty weak as well. Not necessarily their fault, as I think the writers on the show were chronically lackluster. And the production had glaring holes as well. Overall the show suffered from conceptual laziness. From little things like the pacing and some of the background music being silly (I don't mean the vintage 70s tracks, those were great; I mean the incidental music), to much bigger glaring things.

I mean, the 70s pop culture drops were too obvious. The conflict between Tyler's 21st century cop training and Hunt's mean streets experience was lackluster at best. And I tended to notice that the mind bending aspects of Tyler's experience were noticeably absent or weaker whenever it wasn't based on one of the UK episodes. The show needed much more mind bending as it was.

But the best example of this is the show never should have come from the normal ominiscent point of view like it did. That was my biggest problem with it. If the whole universe might or might not be a construct in Sam Tyler's brain, then every single moment of the show has to be in his perspective- you can't have any scenes at all that Tyler is not in. Figments of your imagination don't exist without you.

And while that's not certain what is going on in the show, just one possibility, when you have these long side stories between Mol and Imperioli when Sam is nowhere in the scene, you're pretty much destroying that as a possibility in the viewer's mind. Sam Tyler has to always be present in the scene, even if he's not the focus; he could've been observing it from across the room or something. I know that really makes everything and everyone else secondary, but that's pretty much what they are. The whole thing needed to come from Tyler's POV exclusively to keep its plausibility intact.

Just my two cents.

-Womynpoet: Try BBC America online. I don't know if they do streaming videos of their shows, but they'd have the rights to US broadcast as they showed the UK series last year. And they're playing Ashes to Ashes right now, on Saturday nights I think. So if anyone did they would.

I watched the entire Ashes to Ashes series back in December online through a google search, which is fine if you don't mind the asian subtitles and the less than quality video.

You could also try hulu or netflix and see there as well.