Richard Belzer's portrayal of Detective John Munch on 'Law & Order' set a few Hollywood records -- Munch is the only fictional character, played by a single actor, to appear on ten different television shows across five different networks.

On August 8 at 8PM ET, Belzer will lend his talents to a very different project, narrating Animal Planet's 'The Uprising,' a 2-hour special examining fatal interactions between animals and humans.

Watch Belzer preview the show in video interview with Popeater.com, after the jump ...

"You always made me feel safe, John."

Perfect. Beautiful. That line was delivered by Carol Kane to Richard Belzer on last night's season finale of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. A bit of history. Kane played Gwen Munch, the conspiracy-minded ex-wife of Belzer's Detective John Munch. The last time the two of them played those roles was more than a decade ago, not even on the same show.

When last Detective Munch fans saw the pairing, it was in 1997 on Homicide: Life on the Street. And they picked one hell of an episode to bring her back. Fans of Belzer know he was having fun with the black helicopter crowd before he brought that particular obsession to his character, and last night's episode was tailor-made for him, even if he wasn't really in the forefront of the plot.

Wow, I gotta say that this was a great season finale. I wasn't really familiar with Stuckey, but what happened still shocked me (though I guessed what was going on halfway through). It was rather Bones-ian, in a way.

This could turn out to be the last episode of Law and Order: SVU for Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay, since they are holding out for more money and NBC is thinking of replacing them. Of course, I don't think that's going to happen. Sure, all of the Law and Order shows have had many cast members over the years, but I'm betting that the duo will be back for another season.

"B as in bandits. Who rob. And what do they rob you of? Logs. A blog is something that's contagious. It festers here and it eats away at the planet."

That's Amy Sedaris, explaining what blogs are. She's part of the new, six-part PBS documentary Make 'Em Laugh, which starts airing Wednesday night at 8pm (you can also buy the DVD in stores tomorrow). Amy not only explains the blogs, she also tells us what the internet is in general (like a big cave you drive out of). And "vlog" comes from the Latin for "head cheese."

This portion of the show is after the jump. Looks like PBS/WNET is going the VH-1 route and getting all hip with this documentary, having various experts on comedy sit off to the side of the screen, talking about comedy and making funny remarks, a la I Love The 80s or...well, 22 other shows.This looks like a fun documentary though. Besides Sedaris we'll hear from people like Dick Van Dyke, George Carlin, Carol Burnett, Chris Rock, Will Ferrell, Sid Caesar, Richard Belzer, Joan Rivers, Roseanne Barr, Billy Crystal, Michael McKean, and others. They're also going to feature many online humor, including College Humor, Funny Or Die, and zefrank.

So who saw this past Sunday's episode of The Wire? If you did, then you probably saw the quick little cameo by Richard Belzer as a bar patron near the end of the episode. After I watched it, one question came to mind: was he playing John Munch? According to this NPR article, he was. However, the basis for the logic was subtle and only a serious TV buff would have picked up on it. Not even I caught it and I'm a huge Wire and Homicide fan.

At one point during his conversation with the bartender (as Clark Johnson's character Gus Haynes walked by) Munch mentioned that he owned a bar once. Now if you recall, in the later seasons of Homicide, Munch did own a bar. Here's where it gets interesting though. Do you remember who he owned the bar with? Detective Meldrick Lewis... played by Clark Johnson. Crazy, huh?

Anyway, here's the real point of this post. With this appearance on The Wire, Belzer has now played Munch on eight different programs. That's insane! The only other characters to come close to that are Norm and Cliff (George Wendt and John Ratzenberger) from Cheers with seven distinct appearances each. Read on for more...

Except for the occasional one-liner, Richard Belzer doesn't get a whole lot of face time on Law & Order: SVU. That leaves him with some time to spend on other projects, like these comedy videos and--now--he's writing two books. Belzer, 62, has signed with Simon & Schuster to write two mysteries where he's the star. In the stories, he'll get "caught up in his own plot."

While the books are being billed as mysteries, you know they're going to be chock full of comedy because that's what Belzer really is: a comedian. In fact, he released a great statement about his new venture, "A potent mix of Dashiell Hammett, Oscar Wilde, Lenny Bruce and Robert Altman seasoned by the Belzerian vision of life, as the wry and raucous, raunchy worlds of make-believe and reality converge, this is the first 'reality novel' of the new millennium that explores a unique universe that poses the question, 'What is reality?'"

I'm sure we can expect many more long-winded sentences from Belzer when his first book, "I Am Not a Cop", comes out in fall 2008.

(S08E22) Was it me, or was there just too much happening in this episode? "Screwed" was a culmination of not just this entire season, but of the entire series. And we're left, once again, to wonder whether the SVU squad is going to be disseminated.

The episode starred Ludacris, reprising his role as Det. Tutuola's stepson, Darius, from a March 2006 episode. But, despite the stellar acting job from Ludacris, it wasn't about him at all. In fact, his alleged crime wasn't even the center of the story (I stopped trying to remember the Ludacris episode when I realized that it didn't matter). Instead, Ludacris was the tool the writers used to pick apart all the mistakes the SVU detectives have made over the years and leave us hanging about their fate. The detectives were the ones on trial.

(S08E21) I hate it when the promos ruin an episode. It's hard to tell whether this episode of SVU was a good one because I knew from the promos that the girlfriend was a "black widow". It took a really, really long time for the story to unfold and I felt impatient because I wanted to see the evil side of this girl.

(S08E20) Usually I would say that if Elliot Stabler gets naked, it's gonna be a great episode. I wouldn't call it "great", but it was "good". It's surprising, really, because the topic was incredibly emotional. A man killed his wife and children because his lies were getting out of hand. It's a believable premise because we've seen it played out too many times in the news media (even though L&O didn't promote this one as "ripped from the headlines").

The episode was Elliot-centric, which usually means his family is somehow involved. It was. He saw a man who was bored with his life in Staten Island, so he started making up a new life for himself complete with a fiance who thought he was a CIA agent. Of course, it imploded and, as Dr. Wong said, family killers are so narcissistic that they can't live with the shame of being caught in their lies.

(S08E19) This was the best episode this season, hands down. Det. Olivia Benson's entire world came crashing down around her. Her entire motivation for being an SVU detective was brought into question. There was an awful lot revealed in this episode about Benson's past.

The writers and Mariska Hargitay did a spectacular job convincing me that she had completely lost her mind. Det. Benson appeared to be blindly helping her brother evade the law because she couldn't believe that he was a rapist, just like their father. After the last episode with Simon, I fully believed that he was guilty and I thought she did too.

(S08E18) Okay, I loved the dog owners in this episode. Their priorities were completely skewed. They found a dead teen-ager in their bed, but they were more disturbed by the fact that their dog hadn't been walked while they were on vacation.

This episode was about a subject they love over at SVU: drunk, rich kids. This time, though, the kids aren't the worst of the worst. The real bad guy is a young mother who wants teen-age boys to think she's hot and for her daughter to be popular with her classmates. She buys the kids alcohol and medicates her daughter's problems with alcohol.

(S08E17) The writers of this episode were out to stick it to the right-wing Evangelicals, weren't they? They wrote an emotional script about the subject that gets so many people riled up: homosexuality!

Tim Daly seemed a little detached from his central role in this episode, playing Jeb Curtis, a reverend at New Souls Church in Long Island. I think his character was based on real-life Evangelical minister Ted Haggard, who admitted to doing meth and having affairs with men. Of course, Haggard never killed anyone to cover up his sins (at least not that we know of).

(S08E16) For the most part, I really enjoyed this episode. I liked how the two storylines intertwined- with Liv's search for her brother having an impact on her ability to do her job. What I didn't like was the third storyline of Olivia and Elliot being "too close" and the threat of splitting them up. That's a tired story. They already broke up last season when Mariska Hargitay's pregnancy became too obvious to hide, so Olivia ditched Elliot for after she realized they were too close.

I spent most of this episode being pissed off at Olivia for allowing Elliot to drag himself into her mess. She was way over the line in doing kinship DNA testing in the police database and in stalking her half-brother. Liv had to keep telling lies to cover for her screw ups and Elliot backed her up. Obviously they are "too close" because they're now supporting each other's extra curricular activities.

(S01E13) How about that opening sequence? Before the credits, the entire cast gets to take a shot at a locomotive big guy on PCP. He throws Elliot through a window, knocks out a kid getting off the elevator and even takes a taser shot to the gut from Olivia before Fin takes him out with a chair to the back of the head. Anyway, the entire action sequence was a pretty elaborate way to write Christopher Meloni out of this week's script.

And, how unusual was this episode? The first 40 minutes had us thinking the detectives were investigating their usual child porn case, but then suddenly Olivia passes out?!? That's when the episode takes a turn from child porn to a much headier subject of chemical companies testing their products on humans. Wha? It took me a little while to catch up with the detectives as they spouted out their theories on why people in a low-income apartment building were being gassed. For a while there, I thought the theory was hair-brained and another of Det. Munch's theories. But it just kept going.

Lead actors Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni have both agreed to stick around on Law & Order: SVU for two more seasons. It seems that money did the talking. Variety is reporting that both actors received about a $6.5 million raise for each year season. The publication says Hargitay is going to receive approximately $300,000-$340,000 per episode, pushing her up among the highest-paid female actors on television. Looks like baby August gets to go to private school!

Both actors had a hell of a lot of bargaining power in their contract negotiations. That show delivers consistently strong ratings for NBC and it absolutely would not be the same without Dets. Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler (Think: The X-Files without Mulder and Scully). Let's hope the network gives an incentive to keep Richard Belzer around, too.

SVU is currently in season 8, which means we're guaranteed seasons 9 and 10, which is exactly how long the sexual tension will last.