But to get to that second question I have to answer the first — “What shows have you been on?”– which is usually asked as if I’m on trial for impersonating an actor. I don’t know what makes people so junkyard-dog proprietary about television shows and their favorite stars. Maybe it’s the intimacy of the TV-watching experience — after all, we usually do it at home, alone, on couches. We think of actors as people we see every night in our living rooms, like old friends we just haven’t gotten around to meeting yet. So if we don’t know who someone is, how can he be an actor?

The answer: with a very thick skin.

I am not one of those “old friend” actors. I’m not a star — I’m not even a “name.” But I’m not an extra either. Actors like me occupy the space in people’s minds reserved for utility infielders, station wagons and pizza places. For most people, actors are divided into two groups: Martin Sheen and furniture. You’re part of the pantheon or part of the scenery.

When I was young I studied with Uta Hagen, who wrote the seminal actor’s handbook “Respect for Acting.” And that’s what my friends and I wanted back then: respect, for acting. That and girls. We very much wanted our work to be well thought of, admired, but we also wanted to be famous. Not too famous. Just enough to get sex, but not stalked. Theater famous.

Mostly we just wanted to act. I know that may be hard to believe, but when you do it semi-right, acting is actually about getting away from your ego. It’s like riding a rocket away from your ego and becoming weightless. And the two things you’re incapable of when you’re floating up there are thinking and caring what other people think. Any actor who has ever taken even a few baby steps in the direction of that stupid delight knows how close to perfection it feels — and also how much sex and respect it gets you afterward.

When I left New York eight years ago, I’d been doing pretty well — a couple of yearlong runs in the Broadway shows “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Broadway Bound,” a few national tours, a bunch of regional theater. I had a decent if hardly spectacular career going — I usually got good reviews, and casting directors were sometimes flattering — but after I had been in Los Angeles for a couple of weeks, I was pretty sure I would eventually have a theater named after me. That’s because, on more than one occasion, casting directors had pulled their glasses off very dramatically and said to me, “You are a great actor.” Exactly like that. Not “You’re a great actor,” with the contraction, but “You are a great actor.” All five words, spoken slowly. I was shocked. I was used to auditioning in big rehearsal studios in New York, where I had to project to be heard by the people at the other end of the room, but in L.A. I was suddenly auditioning in tiny, little well-appointed offices, with upholstered furniture, and I was still giving theater-size performances, full of life-and-death intensity and semaphore-like body language. Yet I was getting this very dramatic praise.

So I started to believe it. I am a great actor. I stared at the ceiling at night and rehearsed the avuncular speeches I would make to students accepting the Peter Birkenhead Scholarship at Juilliard. And then, after a third week passed and I hadn’t signed an actual contract, I started to realize that, in Hollywood-speak, “You are a great actor” loosely translates to “You’re an actor.”

The thing you want to hear at an audition is silence — the sound of people quietly smiling. This means, Hey, we’re gonna see you next week; no need to blow smoke in case you become famous; you’re getting the job and that’s flattery enough. Over the next few months, I learned how to stop playing to the balcony and start playing to the couch — and I started to hear a lot more encouraging silence. I was getting the hang of Hollywood.

I finally landed my first television job, playing a fast-talking schmuck of an agent on a Steven Bochco show called “Murder One.” Even I was struck dumb by how good I was in the audition. I don’t think I even said “thank you” as I left the room, because I was too busy thinking, “I am a great actor.”

Now, there is almost no describing how terrible I was on “Murder One,” but here’s my best shot: You know that famous “deer in the headlights” look? Well, imagine the same deer about two weeks later. You know, after the stuffing and mounting. That’s the kind of taxidermic look of fear that you will see on my face if you ever see this scene, which you will only if they create a show called “TV’s Funniest Bloopers and Apparent Brain Hemorrhages.”

Here’s what you won’t see if you ever catch this episode: Bochco, I swear, sitting five feet away from me, with his head in his hands. Seriously. Like, “How did my life come to this?” Like, “How is it possible that all the safeguards we have in place to prevent this kind of disaster from happening could all fail on the same day?”

But I got better. I did some recurring roles on a few shows, and I was a guest star on a bunch of others. I even did another Steven Bochco show, “NYPD Blue,” playing a fast-talking schmuck of a stockbroker (hey, wait a minute ), whom Dennis Franz “liked” for a murder, and I started settling into the Los Angeles version of the working actor’s life.

Here’s what that life is like: Only 5 percent of people who call themselves actors earn enough each year from acting to support themselves. So the number of actors who drive to work in a Porsche, or home through ornate electronic gates, is microscopic. I drive a Honda Hybrid, and I park it on the street in front of my apartment building. I did own a house once, with my ex-wife, but home ownership and marriage are pretty fragile things for people who sometimes wonder if they’ll ever work again.

So I learned early that when I’m on a set I should do my best to enjoy myself, which isn’t always easy. A Hollywood set is basically a boredom factory; I can’t think of a single day job I’ve had that wasn’t more pleasant, in a material sense, than working in television. At least when I waited tables I was in a decorated, well-lit place. There was the smell of fresh food cooking, and sometimes music was playing. It’s not like that on a soundstage. A soundstage smells like plywood, heated rubber and Teamsters. It sounds like the inside of a police van on a stakeout, except when it sounds like a house being renovated. So I usually find myself spending a lot of time visiting the “crafts services table” — the place where all the doughnuts and Twizzlers are kept. Working in television can be as boring as watching television, and it’s best dealt with exactly the same way: by taking breaks to go stare at food, and sometimes eat it.

Series regulars, the stars of the shows, all have time killing down to an art. Tyne Daly knits like crazy. George Clooney shoots hoops. On the best days, there’s a real foxhole-buddies kind of feeling on the set, and it’s pretty easy for me to be seduced into believing I’m on a kind of egalitarian, socialist TV kibbutz, where everyone comes to work in jeans and eats breakfast together. There’s a lot more getting along than you might think, and everyone is busy pitching in. The Steadicam guy is trying to walk backward around the actors as they do emergency rhinoplasty, and the props guy is trying to find a scalpel that has suddenly been added to the scene. It’s Mickey and Judy with $10 million.

The first thing I do when I get to work is make friends with the director of photography. He’s the one responsible for the way every shot is framed and lit. At my most well rested I have dark circles under my eyes, and the D.P. is the one who decides whether I get to look like a really tired Jerry Seinfeld or a dead Steve Buscemi. This is the kind of thing I never cared about in New York, but need to care about now.

I finally became a series regular on a very bad Ted Danson sitcom called “Becker,” playing his only mildly schmucky cousin/accountant. Now, I’d be lying if I said my first thought wasn’t “I’m gonna get to take my new girlfriend to Ted Danson’s house for lunch, and she’s gonna think I’m the shit.” But my second thought was about getting back to New York, and what a two-bedroom apartment might be going for in, oh, about five years. I got tons of laughs during rehearsals for the pilot; Ted Danson even told me I was “great” (uh oh), and the night we shot the pilot, his wife, Mary Steenburgen, grabbed me by the arm and said “I love your character most of all.” Just before the show, I took a walk around the place to soak in the feeling of my new home, and for the first time since I’d worked on Broadway, I let myself imagine a life that included enough health insurance to have children. But I was fully fluent in Hollywood-speak by then, so I knew that when, at the party on the set afterward, the president of Paramount Television gave me a big hug and said, “You are going to be at Paramount for a very long time,” it meant I was going to be at Paramount for about 11 more minutes. My character was cut from the show a month later.

The executive producer called me to deliver the news and said he had just gotten off the phone with Les Moonves, the president of CBS, and that Les had said, among other things, “I’m a big Peter Birkenhead fan.” As my grandfather might have said, “With fans like that, who needs hot air?”

I thought I would be devastated — I wanted to be devastated. But the truth is, when I saw an episode of “Becker” a few months later, I could hear the distinct and comforting sound of a bullet whizzing by my head. And you know what was most comforting of all? That it happened again, right away. The first job I got after “Becker” was on “Frasier,” and that character was cut, too. I realized that losing jobs was just part of the job. My metamorphosis into an L.A. actor was complete.

I’ve worked a lot since then, on shows like “Ally McBeal,” “The West Wing,” “Six Feet Under” and “Grey’s Anatomy” — mostly in parts that were interesting enough to keep me chasing the next job and well paying enough to cover the rent. None of that would have happened if I hadn’t gotten hugged at Paramount, so I’m grateful things went the way they did. And now they’re going a new way.

The guiding principle in television is “get the shot,” which means keep shooting, and talking, no matter what happens, because it might be good enough to move on and finish the episode on time and keep your job. So actors keep plugging away, trying to get the shot — get their shot at making it — even when the odds are staggeringly against them. But the definition of “making it” keeps changing as you hit your 40s and people like Donald Trump become stars.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still an actor — I’m still available for the calls when they come — but mostly I’m busy with other things. I’ve written the word “actor” in the “occupation” space on my tax return for 20 years, but this year I’ll probably put “writer.”

My old dogmas about doing only the noble work of theater became obsolete as soon as I discovered the nobility to be had in punching a studio clock and getting paid for an honest day’s work. But I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be doing that. Being an actor requires a belief in limitless possibilities, and these days I actually prefer limits. When you suspect a star-making, life-changing gig is around every corner it becomes difficult to believe in anything else. But I still watch television, and I love seeing my friends when they’re in something. It’s always like watching a small triumph: Someone’s working again after a dry spell, or got their dental insurance back.

A little happy ending, at least for now.

Why don’t men on television these days have lives? Is even one leading, male character on a nighttime drama married, or dating? As far as I can tell they’re all widowed or divorced. William Petersen on “CSI,” Anthony LaPaglia on “Without a Trace,” David Caruso on “CSI: Miami,” Neal McDonough on “Medical Investigation,” Vincent D’Onofrio on “Law and Order: Criminal Intent,” Hugh Laurie on “House,” Mark Harmon on “Navy NCIS,” Gary Sinise on “CSI: NY” — the characters they play form one big and inexplicable Lonely Hearts Club.

And these guys aren’t just single, they are alone. They go home (when they go home at all) to dark, empty apartments furnished with stuff from the “I Don’t Need Anybody” collection at Ikea, where they plink out solitary jazz piano like Hugh Laurie on “House.” Or, like Neal McDonough on “Medical Investigation,” simply stare into the distance over a frozen dinner, trying to remember what it feels like to give a shit.

They’re not even pining. They’re not thinking, “Maybe someday the sister of a dead guy will notice how good I am with a cotton swab and take me away from all this.” They’re way beyond that. When one of the good-looking young “Navy NCIS” pups under his command suggests to Mark Harmon that he get out more, he barely has the energy to work up a world-weary smirk. These guys, these heroes, have waved the white flag and put their hands up. When they’re not examining blood spatter trajectory or maggot migration patterns, they’re building dioramas or sticking pins into dead things. I was still holding out hope for something a little more interactive in my own social life. But I was starting to get the feeling that there was some kind of unconscious consensus out there in the culture that hope was something for another demographic.

All these stoic loners left me longing for good old Andy Sipowicz, the often unpleasantly human heart at the center of “NYPD Blue.” For all his lack of sophistication, restraint and hair, Sipowicz had the one thing these new TV guys never will: a life. Dennis Franz cycled through a bunch of girlfriends on “NYPD Blue,” which meant that we got to see a bunch of different ways an angry drunk can ruin a relationship; eventually, he showed us how a less angry, reformed alcoholic does his best not to ruin one. We rooted for the relationships to work because Sipowicz was trying to be a better guy. Those interrogation scenes were always as much about him facing down his demons as they were about confronting a perp. He had a story apart from his job, and the way he did the job changed as his personal life evolved. By the last season, Sipowicz was making it work, however tenuously, with a new wife and kid. I miss him.

Of course, as I tuned in each night in my newfound bachelor state, I was dimly aware of the irony that I was spending all my free time watching television and complaining about the way the guys on television spend theirs. But I reminded myself that I wasn’t planning to stay on the couch the way they did — I was just taking a breather. Like most guys, I knew the seductive dangers of solitude all too well — how hard and important it is to resist the siren call of the unalphabetized collection of rare Steve Miller Band bootlegs. At some point in adolescence we all realize that building radio transmitters and memorizing Monty Python routines will not, despite the infuriating unfairness of it all, be rewarded with the love of a good woman. And so we learn to moderate our den-ish tendencies, to poke our heads out of our caves and into the soft and scary light of restaurants. And then, when good love goes bad, we know that we have to be on guard against the urge to devote our lives to Civil War-era stamps or First Edition D.C. Comics. We don’t want to end up like Superman, finding icy solace in the Fortress of Solitude, resigning ourselves to a life without Lois, and telling ourselves that it’s heroic to live that way, that isolation is the price of being so super.

But the new leading men on television have lost that battle, or never even bothered to fight it. They’re all solitary supermen. Lonesome savants who seem to know everything there is to know — except how, or even why, to talk to women. Why have these still young, handsome guys given up, when the less young, less handsome and more drunk Sipowicz didn’t? Is it a question of timing? Did Sipowicz just reflect the Clinton-era fascination with moral fallibility and self-improvement? Maybe the new TV hero is perfect for Bush America: He’s always right, and certain of his rightness, and sees his isolation as proof of that rightness. But then again, George Bush is hardly the staunch defender of rationality and science that the bug collectors are. And these guys have great fun at the expense of “believers” of all stripes. In fact, that’s their problem: their middle-aged skepticism knows no bounds, and extends to the defiantly irrational realm of human relationships.

So they don’t have any. They prefer being smarter than other people to being with other people. In place of the sexually charged and morally complicated (in other words, entertaining) stories we used to get on shows like “ER” (in its heyday) and “The Practice,” we get raised-eyebrow lectures on epidemiology. No more stories about fighting the good fight and trying to conquer (or at least live with) your demons. Now we’re watching stories that amount to the ultimate revenge of the nerds: vindication dramas that are brought to resolution by soft-spoken heroes with the kind of semi-autistic attention to detail that can only be developed through thousands of hours of model-airplane building. These shows aren’t interested in the mere triumph of the shut-in, they want vindication of a sensibility, to ratify the worldview of the 12-year-old basement hermit: The universe can be comprehended, and even restored to order, if only you know enough.

Of course, these particular nerds are also television heroes, so they’re not exactly horn-rimmed, pocket-protector types; they’re as good at staring down perps as they are at peering through spectrometers. But that’s just another aspect of the arrested egghead fantasy — that the scientist Bruce Banner can turn into the Incredible Hulk and that mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent is really Superman. That a life spent cataloging knowledge will make you more of a man, not less. These are the kind of guys who don’t suffer gladly anyone who dares to underestimate the capabilities of a brain that has been playing with itself for years, undistracted by the social and emotional demands of other people.

In fact, they’re not just incapable of normal human interaction, they’re disdainful of it. David Caruso, who’s made a fitful career out of disdain, doesn’t even make eye contact on “CSI Miami.” He delivers his lines like it causes him actual physical pain to relate to a mere human. Vincent D’Onofrio acts as if talking to people is literally killing him — he takes a deep breath after every three words so he can gather enough strength for the next three, like someone who’s dying of lung cancer. He sometimes seems to actually be on the verge of croaking right in the middle of a line, just from the sheer boredom of having to explain things to someone who hasn’t taken the time to memorize the periodic table.

I gotta tell you, it was a little depressing watching these shows. The message from the culture was: Will Everyone Over 40 Please Clear the Field and Get a Hobby.

But I started to feel better as I realized how little I, or anyone I have known, know or will know, have in common with the new heroes. Invariably there’s a scene when a beautiful woman colleague will drop a piano-size hint on the head of our hero about what his life might be like with a little more fun and a little less entomology. And invariably our hero will muster just enough indulgence to dismiss her in a slightly nicer way than he would the bozos from Internal Affairs. On one episode of “CSI,” Jorja Fox, who plays one of the agents, tries to get William Petersen to look up from his maggot puree long enough to notice that there is an actual living, breathing, drop-dead gorgeous girl standing right in front of him, starving for a little attention from her myopic boss. William Petersen looks up cluelessly and says “Um, well … the lab needs you.”

Now here’s what I would say if Jorja Fox hinted to me that she’d enjoy it if I stopped working on my case for just a second and paid some attention to her: “Case? What’s a case? I don’t know what a case is. Does it have anything to do with you, or that incredibly sexy space between your teeth? ‘Cause if it doesn’t, I don’t even want to know.”

But William Petersen doesn’t say that. He has to follow the rule for guys over 40 on television, the one that says: You get the job or the girl, but you can’t have it all. It’s like these men are the new “career women.” Back in the ’70s and ’80s, women on television were allowed to have a job or a life — but not both. Candice Bergen’s Murphy Brown had to have a baby alone, and Mary Tyler Moore’s character had to cry on Mr. Grant’s shoulder ’cause she couldn’t find a boyfriend who respected her commitment to the viewers of WJM-TV. And now the worm has turned. Maybe we’re just getting our karmic payback for not letting Mary and Murphy have it all. Or maybe the women who watch the new procedurals (and women make up the majority of their audience) just enjoy seeing work-obsessed men pay a price for their neglect.

Or overworked middle-aged TV writers are issuing a collective cry for help. Or formaldehyde causes impotence. Whatever.

I don’t care about the new guys anymore. Because after a few weeks I finally had an actual human visitor.

No, not a girl. But the next best thing: the cable guy.

Andy Sipowicz may be gone, but I still have Tony Soprano.