A magic formula circulating the corridors of the country’s leading broadcasters has brought yet another bundle of cash into the country from Hollywood TV producers desperate for another Scandinavian success story.

Step one: rip off an American show, in this case ‘Desperate Housewives’.

Step two: grab the coat-tails of shows like ‘Forbryldsen’ (‘The Killing’) and make sure that anyone who asks understands your Danish drama series could be the next …

Step three: greet transatlantic flights with a placard bearing the message: “Want to buy yet another substandard Danish drama series?”

Granted, the airport arrival lounge theory is a little far-fetched, but somehow Cosmo Films, the producer of ‘Lærkevej’ (lark road) – a series that ran for two seasons from 2009 on TV2 about life in suburbia, which only has a 6.2 rating on IMDB – ended up in the same room as eOne, one of the world’s leading producers and distributors of television, films and music.

And Cosmo managed to sell eOne the option for a series that Politiken in 2009 knowingly described as “desperate”.

TV2 “clearly had Desperate Housewives in mind” – a show that its audience enjoyed 102 episodes of by that point – the newspaper’s review of the first episode concluded.

“He loves his dog most, she loves her dildo,” it observed. Another character had “an itch in her pussy (missen) that called for some bicycle pump action”.

Nevertheless, eOne has partnered with Sony to develop a US adaptation, ‘Park Road’, and to sell it to NBC.

Who will no doubt, sometime in the future, sell it back to a Danish broadcaster