By 
In the season 2 episode of The Wire “Stray Rounds,” a curious detective arrives at the site of a shooting, accompanying Major Bunny Colvin. A thin man with close-cropped silver hair and dark glasses, the detective surveys the chaos with a bemused expression. In his later appearances in seasons 3 and 4, the detective delivers wry, not always welcome observations about the various cases, sometimes irritating his superiors.
You may think that the description above refers to John Munch, the much beloved Law & Order character played by Richard Belzer. No, The Wire is not one of the many, many Law & Order spinoffs, nor is it any of the many, many other shows in which Belzer has appeared as Munch.
However, your guess would only be partially right. Because that character is Dennis Mello, played by Jay Landsman. But Jay Landsman is a character on The Wire, the surly sergeant portrayed by Delaney Williams. And what does that have to do with John Munch, who does look like Bello, but doesn’t actually appear in The Wire?
Don’t worry, we’ll connect all the pieces, just like the best detectives of Baltimore or New York.
Landsman’s Life on the Street
The first chapter of the 1991 non-fiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets begins with the description of a detective examining the body of a dead man. Turning the man’s head reveals a hole from which blood oozes out. “There’s your problem,” the detective observes. “He’s got a slow leak.”
According to the narrator, the line is “vintage Landsman, delivered in perfect deadpan
until even the shift commander is laughing hard in the blue strobe of the emergency lights.” Landsman is just one of the detectives featured in Homicide, a book that chronicles the year Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon spent alongside members of his city’s police department. Although Landsman and his compatriots initially balked at the idea of a reporter following them on investigations, they eventually agreed to give him great access, which gave the book enough detail to be a best seller.
Homicide was so much of a hit, in fact, that it caught the attention of writer Paul Attanasio who, with the help of filmmaker and Baltimore native Barry Levinson, turned the book into the NBC procedural, Homicide: Life on the Street. Rather than directly adapt people from Simon’s book, Attanasio created fictional characters based on the real life cops. Thus, Lieutenant Gary D’Addario became Al Giardello, played by Yaphet Kotto. Detective Harry Edgerton became Frank Pembleton, played by Andre Braugher. And Jay Landsman became John Munch, played by comedian turned actor Belzer.
Munch Makes Moves
Homicide lagged in the ratings behind fellow cop shows of the era NYPD Blue and Law & Order. Yet, it garnered enough critical and good will to last seven seasons and a movie. Those fans included Law & Order creator Dick Wolf, who saw an opening for one of the characters when the show ended in March of 1999. When Law & Order: Special Victims Unit premiered a few months later, there was John Munch serving alongside detectives Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler.
Where Homicide had an arty realism, inspired by the independent cinema movement of the time, SVU is a slick network show. The change gave Belzer room to go broader with Munch, turning his rants about ex-wives and mistrust of the government into likable quirks instead of signs of a potentially unstable personality.
The shift in Munch’s personality made him a fan favorite. Moreover, it allowed him to do more than just jump from Homicide to SVU. While Belzer continued to play Munch in SVU, as well as the main Law & Order series and the spin-off Trial By Jury, he also had one-off appearances in a wide range of shows and movies. Munch shows up in The X-Files episode “Unusual Suspects” and in Arrested Development‘s “Exit Strategy.”
An animated Munch appears in American Dad! while Mike Brady asks Munch for help in A Very Brady Sequel. Belzer plays Munch in fictional episodes of Law & Order for shows such as Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and 30 Rock. In fact, no other fictional character played by a single actor has appeared in more series than Richard Belzer as John Munch.
Back to Jay
But what about the guy who started it all, Jay Landsman? When he turned his attention to making his own TV shows, Simon brought Landsman along. The 2000 HBO miniseries The Corner, based on the 1997 book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, which Simon co-wrote with former cop Ed Burns, has a brief appearance from the real Landsman.
Simon did not bring Landsman into his next HBO show The Wire—at least not in body. The big, gregarious Delaney Williams doesn’t match Landsman’s frame, but he did have the same sarcastic sense of humor found in the first chapter of the Homicide book, which justified Simon’s decision to name the character Jay Landsman.
Enjoyable as Williams’s take was, he couldn’t replace the real guy. Which is why we get to finally see the actual Jay Landsman on screen throughout The Wire. Sure, he never steals the spotlight from McNulty or Bunk, or even Williams’s outgoing Landsman. But he never misses with his sardonic observations, forever proving that Jay Landsman is the true John Munch.
The post John Munch: The Real and Fictional Lives of TV’s Most Prolific Detective appeared first on Den of Geek.
