See a 'True Detective' villain's 'Sex and the City' past

[Semi-spoilers if you haven’t seen the True Detective finale. *shakes fist at HBO Go*]

Did Errol Childress — the sister-groping serial murderer whose reign of terror was finally foiled on Sunday night’s True Detective — look weirdly familiar to you? If so, you probably recognized actor Glenn Fleshler from Boardwalk Empire (he played bootlegger George Remus) or Damages (as Detective Milton Trammell).

What you may not realize, however, is that those two shows were hardly Fleshler’s first brush with prestige cable TV. Check out the bottom of his IMDB profile, and you’ll find that way back in 1998, he made one of his very first onscreen appearances in the very first season of Sex and the City — as Shmuel, a smoldering Hasidic artist who briefly tangles with Charlotte (Kristin Davis).

Their affair isn’t long; in fact, it pretty much begins when Charlotte enters Shmuel’s art studio and ends when she puts her clothes back on. It is, however, scored by a Fiddler on the Roof-esque Klezmer tune — and holds the distinction of being the first and only SATC tryst spurred by a sexy painting of a Yeshiva. And nobody gets murdered during the scene, so it’s got that going for it too.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any embeddable video of Charlotte and Errol’s torrid fling — so you’ll just have to content yourself with this montage of the Episcopalian princess’s gradual conversion to Judaism instead. For a fuller experience, please mute it while playing the True Detective theme below. L’chaim!