Just reading the wiki on him, he’s played the character in 10 different shows.
I know L&O and Homicide had several cross over episodes and Munch appears in a cameo in The Wire. So does this all mean they’re all in the same universe or just a tv producer in-joke?
Yes. >_>
Yes. In addition, the same accident that gave Daredevil his powers created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Warehouse 13 and Eureka are legitimately in the same universe, even though one deals in science and the other in supernatural power.
Well, if you believe in the idea of TV crossover universes, that’s exactly what’s happening. People have worked out what all the crossover universes are by throwing together into groups any shows with characters in common. The TV crossover universe website was messed up when I tried to access it, so you may have problems getting to it. Here’s the URL:
http://www.poobala.com/crossoverlistb.html
The list of TV crossover universes is given at the link that says, “Click here to go to lists of crossovers and spin offs broken down into groups by their shared realities.” I can’t get that link to work at the moment. The last time I went there, the shows with John Munch in them (and many other shows) were in Group 2.
If the question you’re asking is, “But is this really a universe or just a joke?”, the answer is “This is just fiction. You can pretend that it’s real and go along with our geeky desire to show that it’s one big universe, or you can forget about any idea of consistency, since most TV shows are pretty weak on consistency, and just treat it as a joke. You can’t ask what is really true, since nothing is really true in fiction.”
No, it doesn’t. There are parallel versions of John Munch in all those series.
In fact it could be argued that some crossover storylines between shows with wildly different thematic character are actually the alternate versions of “parallel” events in different secondary realities. I’m thinking here of the old Pretender/Profiler crossovers. The profilers existed in the Pretender-verse, & Jarod existed in the Pretender-verse, but each half of the crossover was written on the terms of its thematic reality, & might contradict the other half.
While this is the other possibility, it’s not necessarily true. It’s really only necessary if the two histories are incompatible.
In this case, I would assume the intent was to imply they were the same universe. Ths shows are similar, and, while I haven’t seen the scene in question, I’ve read that he does not seem out of character, and there is no contradictions in assuming they are in the same universe.
On the other hand, I prefer to believe that the kid in St. Elsewhere was dreaming about shows he’d watched on TV, and only the episodes with the crossovers were in his mind, unless proven otherwise on the show in question. It gets too difficult too quickly to make everything match up. And what’s the point, anyways, if it’s a dream, and thus anyone can be out of character or have their past rewritten at any point?
Don’t forget the X-Files!
And Arrested Development, surprisingly enough.
Cracked had a recent article on this
The Poobalah website that I linked to above is still messed up. That’s too bad, since it’s a complete list of all crossover universes within American TV. This link will give you a list of the shows that John Munch is connected to through crossovers. This crossover universe has dozens of TV shows in it:
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~kwgow/crossovers.html
In the section of the webpage called “Download”, it gives links for various formats of the chart of this crossover universe.
I could swear I saw Munch in a Star Trek episode.
The site works for me, but I was pretty disappointed. They bunch things together that are clearly just referencing one another, or reusing the same arbitrary made-up names (like “Yoyodyne” for a corporation)–not just ones that have actual characters or narratives in common. And then they’ll chain several of these together to suggest that there’s some connection, for example, between Bewitched and Star Trek.
I like the idea of all the Munch appearances gathering those shows in a shared universe, and I’m interested in other equivalent connections, but the group lists there are essentially meaningless except as a foundation for trivia games, I suppose.
BTW, it looks to me like there are only eight shows (three of them L&Os) with the Munch character as such. The Wiki says that in 30 Rock those characters are just watching an SVU episode themselves. And surely the Jimmy Kimmel talk show can’t be construed as “sharing a universe.”
If you’re connected with L&O, you’re connected with Homicide: Life in the Street, which means you’re connected to St. Elsewhere… which, of course, is the Tommyverse, which connects 282 separate shows (as of this website’s last updating), including The Wire and Law and Order.
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Okay, I’m dropping Munch’s show count to seven now. The Arrested Development claim is bogus, it’s just Richard Belzer appearing on screen for a second as one of several famous-actor-faces who show up at the Save Our Bluths dinner.
Exactly. A character can appear in more than one reality. That doesn’t mean that they’re all the same reality.
But isn’t it more fun if they’re the same? Why call them different?
Some of the links are more concrete than others of course. L&O and Homicide had joint episodes like “Baby, it’s you” which was a two parter started in L&O then continued on in Homicide. Munch also eventually became a mainstay of L&O:SVU when Homicide was cancelled. I suppose you could say that the Munch that appears in these three shows is a different alternate reality Munch but they all give every indicator that he’s the same character, in the same universe across the three.
What? No… That’s Belzer’s first appearance on Arrested Development, sure, but the one that actually matters is Detective John Munch showing up as part of a police sting to ensnare the Bluths, in the episode Exit Strategy.