Ellen Gray: 'Amsterdam' a long-lived love story

NEW AMSTERDAM. 9 tonight and 9 p.m. Thursday. Moves to 9 p.m. Mondays next week, Channel 29.

IF YOU knew you would probably live forever, would you spend a good chunk of that life fighting crime?

If you were one of television's immortals, you almost certainly would.

Bad enough that they're doomed to outlive everyone they know, not once, but many times: Must they also be pigeonholed?

If there's anything new about Fox's "New Amsterdam" - which gets "previews" tonight and Thursday before settling in to a Monday time slot next week - it's that John Amsterdam (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) isn't a vampire, like "Angel" or Mick (Alex O'Loughlin) from CBS' "Moonlight."

No, he's a Dutch soldier from, yes, New Amsterdam, which is what they used to call the Big Apple back in the 1600s. (Coster-Waldau's actually Danish, not Dutch, a discrepancy that won't be obvious to most viewers, even when his American accent occasionally slips a little.)

Instead of a bite on the neck, our not-so-new John remains in Manhattan courtesy of a good deed he performed for a Native American girl more than 350 years ago. He'll only get to die when he finds the love of his life.

As backstories go, it's kind of a silly one (though perhaps no sillier than the theory advanced in a recent episode of "Moonlight" that the French Revolution's Reign of Terror aimed to rid the country of its high-born vampires, a cult said to include King Louis XVI).

"When you've lived here as long as I have, and you've seen what I've seen, cynicism isn't just a pose - it's what gets you through the day," says Amsterdam tonight, sounding more like a TV critic than anything else.

Not this TV critic, though.

At least not today.

There being few, if any, original ideas in 60 years or so of television, execution (sorry, Louis) is everything. And "New Amsterdam's" pilot, directed by Lasse Hallstrom ("Casanova," "The Shipping News"), who's also one of the show's executive producers, is as well-executed as any I've seen this season.

It's also a kind of Valentine to New York and its history along the lines of Mark Helprin's masterpiece, "Winter's Tale," which also featured a long-lived hero who reveled in the city's secrets.

And if you think Vincent D'Onofrio's a know-it-all on "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," well, imagine all that trivia packed into a brain that's been collecting it for going on 400 years.

But Amsterdam, who calls his dog 36, hasn't just been boning up on New York lore all these centuries. He's also been searching for "the one," never sure he hasn't found her till she ages and he doesn't.

His only acquaintance in the know, at least currently, is a sexagenarian named Omar (Stephen Henderson), whose own back story is the most intriguing aspect of Thursday's episode.

Let's just say that Omar has every reason to be ambivalent about Amsterdam's search.

Amsterdam, though he's changed names and professions over the years, seems ambivalent himself, but mostly about the secrecy inherent in living forever: He's a relentless truth-teller, forever dropping hints about his World War II service or his time at Brown University or other aspects of his past, secure in the knowledge that no one's listening that carefully, or likely to believe him.

Coster-Waldau plays him as half-romantic, half-wiseguy, a cynic hoping to be surprised.

There are worse things that could happen. *

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