KD^3C^3 - 20251102 It's been a long year
Do people know about the John Munchiverse?
I made an offhand comment online this week about the Munchiverse, and how I think it would be fun to have a channel on my ErsatzTV system showing episodes from all the shows where John Munch appeared.
But I took it as given that people would know who I was talking about when I mentioned Detective Munch. Well I think of him as Detective Munch, but it turns out at some point he earned his Sergeant stripes, so I guess he's technically Sergeant Munch now. But that;s not important.
From 1996 to 2016, so thirty years, John Munch was a character played by Richard Belzer on a variety of TV shows. HE started off as a main character on Homicide: Life on the Street, which is a show that would last for seven years and redefined what a cop show could be. It showed the detectives who worked homicide not as upstanding guardians of justice, but as the complex people they actually were. It also was one of the earlier shows to focus on serialized stories over multiple episodes, or even entire season long stories. If you go back and watch it now, (and you probably should) it'll probably seem pretty dated at spots, but it was a big deal to do what it was doing at that time. It started a few months before NYPD Blue, another show that would push the police procedural boundaries and pave the way for the shows that would come later like The Shield and The Wire.
The Wire was another show created by the same guy who originally created Homicide: Life on the Streets, David Simon. Simon started life as a reporter, working the crime beat for the Baltimore Sun. He would eventually turn his reporting into a book and would then adapt that book into the TV Show Homicide. But We're getting off track.
In the show Homicide, many of the characters were loosely based on people in Simon's book, and thus real people. One of those characters was John Munch. ABUt John munch was such a great character that he survived the end of Homicide. He retired from Baltimore and moved to New York where he got another job as a cop, the sort of thing that mostly happens on TV Shows. The show in question Was Law & Order Special Victims Unit. He was a main character on that show for an additional fifteen years before retiring again.
Because Law & Order crosses over with the other shows in the franchise with some regularity (and Homicide Life on the Street did a couple Law & order crossovers even before that) Munch eventually ended up appearing in 3 of the 6ish different Law & order Shows. (he never showed up on LA, or Criminal Intent, or UK, or the shows that came later like Organized Crime).
Not content to show up on only law & order shows, the detective made a cameo on a few other shows too, often on different networks. He made an appearance in an episode of The Wire (as I mentioned, it was also created by David Simon) and The X-Files and Arrested Development and even animated and puppet appearances on American Dad and Sesame Street respectively. He's been on a lot of shows.
As I said in a previous newsletter, I built a law & order channel, which currently has the original 20 seasons of the Mothership show, plus a smattering of Criminal Intent and SVU seasons. I picked up the complete series of Homicide Life on the Street a couple weeks ago, and it seemed remiss to not include those too. I already own The wire, the X Files and Arrested development on DVD, so it was easy enough to throw those into the rotation too. So now my Law & Order channel has been renamed The Munchiverse. I still need to pick up the rest of the L&O spinoff seasons I don't have, but those have been on the long list for a long time, so I'll get them eventually. The only thimg I'm missing (if I limit myself to live action) is a short lived series called The Beat that aired on UPN and was cancelled before the first season even aired. It never got an official DVD release, but maybe I can convince the universe to make that happen. It's one DVD set, how much could it cost to manufacure, ten dollars?
I made an offhand comment online this week about the Munchiverse, and how I think it would be fun to have a channel on my ErsatzTV system showing episodes from all the shows where John Munch appeared.
But I took it as given that people would know who I was talking about when I mentioned Detective Munch. Well I think of him as Detective Munch, but it turns out at some point he earned his Sergeant stripes, so I guess he's technically Sergeant Munch now. But that;s not important.
From 1996 to 2016, so thirty years, John Munch was a character played by Richard Belzer on a variety of TV shows. HE started off as a main character on Homicide: Life on the Street, which is a show that would last for seven years and redefined what a cop show could be. It showed the detectives who worked homicide not as upstanding guardians of justice, but as the complex people they actually were. It also was one of the earlier shows to focus on serialized stories over multiple episodes, or even entire season long stories. If you go back and watch it now, (and you probably should) it'll probably seem pretty dated at spots, but it was a big deal to do what it was doing at that time. It started a few months before NYPD Blue, another show that would push the police procedural boundaries and pave the way for the shows that would come later like The Shield and The Wire.
The Wire was another show created by the same guy who originally created Homicide: Life on the Streets, David Simon. Simon started life as a reporter, working the crime beat for the Baltimore Sun. He would eventually turn his reporting into a book and would then adapt that book into the TV Show Homicide. But We're getting off track.
In the show Homicide, many of the characters were loosely based on people in Simon's book, and thus real people. One of those characters was John Munch. ABUt John munch was such a great character that he survived the end of Homicide. He retired from Baltimore and moved to New York where he got another job as a cop, the sort of thing that mostly happens on TV Shows. The show in question Was Law & Order Special Victims Unit. He was a main character on that show for an additional fifteen years before retiring again.
Because Law & Order crosses over with the other shows in the franchise with some regularity (and Homicide Life on the Street did a couple Law & order crossovers even before that) Munch eventually ended up appearing in 3 of the 6ish different Law & order Shows. (he never showed up on LA, or Criminal Intent, or UK, or the shows that came later like Organized Crime).
Not content to show up on only law & order shows, the detective made a cameo on a few other shows too, often on different networks. He made an appearance in an episode of The Wire (as I mentioned, it was also created by David Simon) and The X-Files and Arrested Development and even animated and puppet appearances on American Dad and Sesame Street respectively. He's been on a lot of shows.
As I said in a previous newsletter, I built a law & order channel, which currently has the original 20 seasons of the Mothership show, plus a smattering of Criminal Intent and SVU seasons. I picked up the complete series of Homicide Life on the Street a couple weeks ago, and it seemed remiss to not include those too. I already own The wire, the X Files and Arrested development on DVD, so it was easy enough to throw those into the rotation too. So now my Law & Order channel has been renamed The Munchiverse. I still need to pick up the rest of the L&O spinoff seasons I don't have, but those have been on the long list for a long time, so I'll get them eventually. The only thimg I'm missing (if I limit myself to live action) is a short lived series called The Beat that aired on UPN and was cancelled before the first season even aired. It never got an official DVD release, but maybe I can convince the universe to make that happen. It's one DVD set, how much could it cost to manufacure, ten dollars?