James Sikking died of complications from dementia, his publicist said.
James Sikking , who starred as a hardened police lieutenant on " Hill Street Blues " and as the titular character's kindhearted dad on " Doogie Howser , M.D.," has died at 90.
"Hill Street Blues" would debut in 1981, a fresh take on the traditional police procedural. Sikking played Lt. Howard Hunter, a clean-cut Vietnam War veteran who headed the Emergency Action Team of the Metropolitan Police Department in a never-named city. When it debuted on the heels of a Hollywood dual strike, the NBC show was met with low ratings and little fanfare. But the struggling network kept it on the air: "Up popped this word 'demographic,'" Sikking told the Star Tribune in 2014. "We were reaching people with a certain education and made a certain kind of money. They called it the 'Esquire audience.'"
Sikking would earn an Emmy nomination for outstanding supporting actor in a drama in 1984. The look and format of "Hill Street Blues" were something new to Sikking - and many in the audience, from the grimy look of the set to the multiple storylines that often kept actors working in the background, even when they didn't have lines in the scene.
"It was not my cup of tea. I was not into that kind of outer space business. I had an arrogant point of view in those days. I wanted to do real theater. I wanted to do serious shows, not something about somebody's imagination of what outer space was going to be like," Sikking explained to startrek.com in 2014.
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