Television

There’s something about David Morse that apparently screams “cop” to casting directors.

Or sometimes, “scary cop.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Morse this week. “This is what comes my way, and this isn’t even all of them that I’m asked to do.”

The Philadelphia-based actor, who starred for two seasons in Hack as a disgraced cop-turned-cabbie and who earlier this year played a very scary cop indeed opposite Bruce Willis and Mos Def in 16 Blocks, returns to television tonight for a six-episode stint on Fox’s House.

As a cop.

First, though, Morse’s Michael Tritter will be a patient.

And when a clinical encounter with House’s badly behaved genius, Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), turns out the way it does for most of House’s clinic patients, Tritter sets out to bring the healer to heel.

“I think that they wanted who could really stand toe to toe” with House “and be a significant challenge to him,” Morse said.

Tritter and House, he said, share a “kind of talent,” a mix of quirkiness and intuition that Tritter will be using to challenge the Vicodin-popping physician in new ways.

“They wanted somebody who was kind of an equal force to him,” Morse said.

“I think that they felt they were getting away with stuff that the audience was beginning to call them on and that they needed to challenge themselves as well,” he added.

The actors, too, weren’t such a bad match.

“For me, it’s great, just because he’s so great,” Morse said of working with Laurie.

“Any time you get to work with somebody — not just with his talent, but with his generosity,” it’s worth it, he said. “And I think I appreciate that more and more in my life, to work with people who aren’t just generous, but generous with their talent.”

Morse, a working actor for 35 years — he turned 53 earlier this month — named no names, but said some actors think “misbehaving is part of their genius ... and I’ve gotten a little tired of that.”

Before being cast on House, Morse said he had never even seen the show, and he didn’t know that former Hack executive producer David Shore created it.

“It’s not hard to imagine why he wanted to go and do a show like this after Hack,” he said.

“Taking a complicated and challenging character, really, with a sense of humor — you just can’t believe that a doctor ... or even a show can get away with it,” he said.

“It’s a tribute to Fox and the audience. They stuck with it and they got one of the great characters on TV,” Morse said.

“It’s something we tried to do with Hack and for various reasons didn’t succeed, he said, CBS never having viewed the show quite the way its star did.

This season, Morse is also high on NBC’s Friday Night Lights.

He was approached to play the coach and was tempted by a great script, he said, but “because it was shooting in Austin (Texas), there was just no way. I would never see my family.”