Before NYPD Blue, David Caruso Guest-Starred On One Of The Best '80s Cop Dramas

Fighting crime on the East Coast has been a mainstay of David Caruso's TV career thanks to his two-season stint on ABC's "NYPD Blue" before leading CBS' "CSI: Miami" for a decade. But he also guest-starred on one of the best '80s cop dramas that helped set the high bar for modern police procedural TV shows.

Caruso appeared on "Hill Street Blues" — an influential show that initially had trouble with NBC's censors. At the time, he was on the opposite side of the law as Tommy Mann, the leader of the Shamrocks gang. He was dressed like an Irish version of Alex (Malcolm McDowell) in "A Clockwork Orange," complete with a shirt, tie, waistcoat, and red top hat. Mann and his eccentric outfit were a melodramatic addition to "Hill Street Blues," which was a fairly grounded, gritty cop drama. Mann was nowhere near as extreme as Alex in the Stanley Kubrick movie, but Caruso still brought an intensity to the role.

His first appearance in the '80s show was in Season 1, Episode 2, "Presidential Fever," in which the officers try to negotiate peace between several different gangs during a visit from the president of the United States. Caruso's gangster points out to the officers that the president can't walk through different gang turfs because there's no peace treaty. It's moments like these that prove "Hill Street Blues" tried to go deeper with its storylines than just cops versus robbers.

David Caruso broke out thanks to playing Detective John Kelly in "NYPD Blue," and it's still seen as one of the best TV crime dramas of all time. So it's fitting that he was briefly hired by the authorities when he was a teenager. When speaking to Us Weekly (per Mary Ellen Mark), he recalled being hired to stand in a police lineup. Caruso explained, "A detective was looking for a friend of mine, and he goes, 'Wanna make 25 bucks in half an hour?' It was 'cause I had the red hair."

The "Hill Street Blues" and "CSI: Miami" star also said that he'd had brushes with violence while growing up: "I had some friends that died young and brutally. But I had enough self‑regard not to go that way. I had a sense that I was gonna do something else with my life."

His sense, or at least drive to succeed, led him to Hollywood — and he moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1980 to pursue his acting career. It was a gamble which paid off, and he even wound up filming "NYPD Blue" in the same neighborhood that he grew up in. Caruso told the Los Angeles Times that he found it surreal "sitting in an unmarked police car on Queens Boulevard ... oh, man, I'm telling you."