Nikolaj Coster-Waldau must feel about as old as his character in the new Fox series "New Amsterdam." He has been waiting a long time for his show to get on the air.

The cast met with members of the press in July to talk about the show. Central character John Amsterdam, played by Coster-Waldau, is a homicide detective who is around 400 years old, give or take a decade.

"New Amsterdam" was originally on the fall schedule and then got bumped to be a midseason replacement show on Fox. The writers' strike delayed the midseason. Now the show is finally getting on the air, and in a big way.

The first episode airs at 9 tonight. It will be followed by episodes at 9 p.m. Thursday and 9 p.m. Monday .

Because this guy has been hanging around New York for four centuries, he may have the definitive New York accent. That was a challenge the Denmark native Coster-Waldau faced, but he says it wasn't that difficult.

"I lived in London for some years, and I spoke slightly different then," he says. "When I moved to London, I stayed with my sister, and we had a rule. I didn't allow her to speak Danish to me because I wanted to perfect the English, and I would repeat everything that I saw on the television."

That rule helped him land roles in numerous films: "Black Hawk Down," "Enigma," "Kingdom of Heaven" and "Wimbledon."

The accent wasn't the actor's only concern. It is not unusual for an actor to create a history for a character. Those details help them in playing the role.

That kind of background work would have been tough for Coster-Waldau because his character has been around for 400 years. So he opted to do research on New York instead.

"I've done a lot of reading about the history of New York, which has been fantastic," says Coster-Waldau.

He wasn't the only person to look into New York's past. Executive producer David Manson says that one of the pleasures of working on the show has been that he got to learn more about the city.

"We have these large tomes on the history of New York like 'Gotham,' which is 1,700 pages and it only gets you to 1890. We've been trying to leaf through as much of the history of New York as we can. It's fascinating, because it's an incredibly dynamic city and it's all about change," Manson says. "For a character who is able to understand the archaeology of the city, it creates sort of a unique character."

While he hasn't written a whole history for his character, Coster-Waldau is fairly certain that Amsterdam has fought some bouts with insanity over the years as he watched those he cared for grow old and die.

For a time, it looked like that was going to be the fate of the television series.'New Amsterdam'