The fictional character who appears in 10 different TV series
Crossovers are all the rage these days in an era of shared mythologies, legacy sequels, and multiverses, but one recurring character quietly developed a habit of showing up across the length and breadth of some of the most popular TV shows around to create a one-man universe.
When Richard Belzer made his first appearance in Homicide: Life on the Street, neither the showrunners nor the performer would have any idea just how deep the John Munch rabbit hole would end up going. In the end, it expanded to record-breaking proportions, and even spawned a theory that draws great swathes of pop culture into its orbit.
A series regular through all seven seasons of Life on the Street, Belzer was offered the opportunity to reprise the role in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. From there, he would be part of that particular small screen universe for over a decade and a half, making further appearances in the main Law & Order and a single episode of Law & Order: Trial by Jury.
That barely scratches the surface of Munch’s proclivity for showing up in the most unexpected of places, though, considering that even before Law & Order he’d cameoed in The X-Files season five episode ‘Unusual Suspects’ that crossed over with Life on the Street.
He also appeared in the second episode of short-lived police procedural The Beat, reached Arrested Development in the third season’s penultimate episode ‘Exit Strategy’, swung by The Wire‘s season five story ‘Took’, and played Munch in an SVU episode being watched by the characters in 30 Rock’s ‘¡Qué Sorpresa!’ as part of footage that was shot specifically for the show, before going meta as himself playing the actor who plays Munch in the first part of series finale ‘Last Lunch’.
An outing on Jimmy Kimmel Live! led to an impromptu skit where he played Munch, too, making the character the only fictional creation to be played by the same actor in ten different network TV shows, which were split across five different stations.
The MunchVerse didn’t end there, though, with a voice role in American Dad‘s ‘Next of Pin’, and another fictional Law & Order spinoff existing as part of Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt being joined by a name-drop in Luther, where Idris Elba’s title character mentions Munch as a contact he has in the NYPD’s Special Victims Unit.
As suggested by an expanded MunchVerse theory, though, his crossover with The X-Files opens the doors to the character technically being connected to The Simpsons and Cops, where Mulder and Scully would make their own crossover cameos. Beyond that, people in the sci-fi classic smoke fictional Morley cigarettes, which in turn would show up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Friends, and American Horror Story to name but a few, with the fake brand being used as far back as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Through this lens, then, Munch might just be at the centre of the entire film and television universe.
