Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is Denis Leary, er, John Amsterdam, a New York City homicide detective who is immortal, a real plus in the Big Apple.

If John Amsterdam has been around since 1642, he really should have tied up some of the loose ends in New Amsterdam.

Yes, we know, there's that whole suspension-of-disbelief thing. To be fair, New Amsterdam, a drama starring Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau that debuts tonight on Global and Fox, is not without its charm.

But if you allow your mind to dwell on the practicalities of the situation, you'll be distracted, no matter what year it is. And it won't merely be because Coster-Waldau looks an awful lot like Denis Leary.

"I don't think he kept his sanity all that time, and if you saw the pilot, at one time he was an alcoholic," Coster-Waldau said of his character, not Denis Leary. "It has been a tough 350 years."

Hey, for everyone.

New Amsterdam centres on a New York homicide detective named John Amsterdam who has a unique secret: He is immortal. His time in the Big Apple dates all the way back to when it was a colony known as New Amsterdam. Get it?

"Best invention? Indoor plumbing," John says tonight. "Worst invention? The alarm clock."

Funny, we would have thought the obvious "best invention" for a man who is almost 400 years old would be Viagra.

Anyway, in 1642, when John was a Dutch soldier, he stepped in front of a sword to save the life of a Native American girl. The grateful girl then brought him back to life with an ancient spell.

So John will not age until he finds his one true love. Then he will become whole, and therefore ready for mortality.

Say what?

"Isn't that the question all of us ask?" Coster-Waldau said, referring to everyone's search for true love. "I mean, I'm married. Sometimes I love my wife to bits. Other times I go, 'This can't be it.' "

That's pretty funny, actually. But as far as New Amsterdam goes, John's decades-long search for true love brings up some conceptual problems.

What if John's true love died in, say, 1822, or 1947, or 2004, and he never met her? He'd be kind of screwed, wouldn't he?

In his police work, John uses his intricate knowledge of New York's geographic and social history to his advantage. He keeps dropping these historical nuggets on his wide-eyed new partner, played by Zuleikha Robinson, who accepts them as idiosyncratic rather than exceptionally weird.

The crime-story element in the first episode of New Amsterdam is horribly goofy. It's a distracting sidebar that you won't care about at all.

The only interesting bits have to do with John himself, and the fresh news that a strange physical reaction that he experiences in a subway station one day may be an indication that his one true love actually was in the vicinity.

You know, generally we find storylines like this kind of cool. There's a great sequence tonight when all the pictures John supposedly has taken in Times Square through the decades are shown quickly one after the other. You can see New York's history unfolding before your eyes.

And speaking of immortality, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde is one of our favourite books.

But John Amsterdam is no Dorian Gray.

Here's betting that New Amsterdam's run will last considerably less than 350 years.