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Detective John Munch is a fictional character played by the actor Richard Belzer. Munch is notable for his crossover appearances in a number of different television series' fictional universes.

Character development

Detective Munch first appeared as a homicide detective in a fictional police department in Baltimore as a central character in the TV series Homicide: Life on the Street. After 20 years service in Baltimore, he took his pension and moved to New York to join a sex crimes investigation unit, as one of the main characters in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Although Munch was established as an interesting, three-dimensional character in the ensemble "Homicide" (in which he was depicted as a cynical conspiracy theorist) his move to "SVU" has largely stripped him of many of the character's defining characteristics; the size of his role has become increasingly small as the show progresses.

Munch can find details that other detectives don't see. This has occured in several episodes. One of them was watching a security video tape, where he noticed that part of the evidence had been cut. Another time, he noticed that two suspects had nodded at each other, and another looked as though "he had just had sex."

Munch was described in the Special Victims Unit episode "Lost" as a stubborn man that can "smell conspiracy from a five-year-old's lemonade stand", according to the government psychiatric evaluator. He had had a grand total of three wives until marrying his fourth wife, Betty Lou, during the final Homicide episode; each one of the previous three was "beautiful, spoiled, and none of them matched intellectually."

Munch's cynical facade has occasionally slipped, however, revealing a deep compassion borne from an unhappy childhood (his father committed suicide after yelling at him, causing him to believe for years afterward that it was his fault.)

Other crossovers

Munch has also appeared as a character in episodes of four other series:

• Law & Order - 4 episodes: "Charm City Part 1", "Baby, It's You", "Sideshow" and "Entitled Part 2".
• The X-Files - 1 episode: "Unusual Suspects"
• The Beat - 1 episode: "They Say It's Your Birthday"
• Law & Order: Trial by Jury - 1 episode: "Skeleton (2)"

Munch's appearance on Trial by Jury, which aired April 15, 2005, made him the first fictional character played by a single actor to appear on six different television shows.

Munch also made an appearance in the TV movie Homicide: The Movie.

John Munch is the most prolific character in a fictional universe known as the Tommy Westphall Universe, named after a character on St. Elsewhere. Producer Tom Fontana worked on both series and conciously expands the universe with most of the new series he creates. 行驶记录仪

• Characters in the Law & Order franchise
• Fictional police officers
• Fictional characters