Thursday Morning Man: Jesse Metcalf!

When Jesse Metcalf appeared before journalists during the TV Critics Association Summer Press Tour in August, he was all business as he chatted up the new NBC action series Chase on which he has a role.

The show follows a U.S. Marshals fugitive apprehension team based out of Houston.

He described his character of Luke Watson this way: “To get out of the shadow of his overbearing father, he decides to join the [police] academy to prove himself to his father and also to find himself. He’s intelligent, he’s very driven, he’s very capable and very logical. He learns from all his US Marshall teammates.”

The actor seemed a world away from the guy who made tabloid headlines for his partying which included a well-publicized fistfight and also falling more then 30 feet to the ground during a party in Monaco after he had hosted the World Music Awards.

The 31-year-old actor, who gained prime-time fame as the sexy gardener John on ABC’s Desperate Housewives, had spent five years on the daytime soap Passions in the role of Miguel Lopez-Fitzgerald.

He played played a wealthy and insincere teenage playboy in his feature film debut John Tucker Must Die and most recently starred with Michael Douglas and Amber Tamblyn in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.