Go to this thread for the mothership.
So, spin-offs only. Go!
For me, it’s Goren and Eames, hands down.
Concur.
I didn’t get into any of the spin-offs until Jeff Goldblum showed up. Sadly, he didn’t last.
John Munch, hands down.
Goren!
Nicole Wallace!
“Hello, Bobby…”
John Munch
As for recurring guests, definitely Nicole Wallace.
I am posting without reading the thread so I can make a prediction. I predict that Goren from Criminal Intent will be the easy winner for single character and that the original foursome from that show will win for favorite team.
Oliva “Mariska” Benson. Yummy.
I vote John Munch. Which puts him over Goren 3-2 for the moment.
Munch is a great character, but perhaps a bit too much of a Lenny Briscoe clone. Cragen has a great hangdog resilience about him. Stabler would have been better if they’d written him out as they should have, placed on leave (with pay) for beating up, killing, and starting to eat an innocent suspect in the interrogation room.
Favorite eye candy? Casey Novak. (Redhead only; why they made her go blonde I’ll never know.)
That makes me very sad. But I came back to agree with whoever said that Olivia Benson is gorgeous. At her height she is by far the best-looking major character on any of the series. Even now that she has gotten a little older she is much hotter than average.
Olivia Benson
She’s beautiful, and a tough cookie too. 
Why is it that both in this thread and in the L&O original series thread, most of those arguing for women as their favorite characters have had to say at least some thing about how pretty they are, whereas no such comments are made for any of the male characters? Whether this is because dopers are superficial or because they female characters in L&O are superficial (or that much more beautiful), I don’t know, but I do find it a bit disturbing.
At any rate, for me it’s Goren. I like Munch, but he’s too marginal a character to be the show’s favorite character for me.
With the exception of S Epatha Merkerson who played Lieutenant Van Buren all the regular female actresses are clearly chosen in large part for their locks. This is most explicit in the female DAs.
My faves were the SVU team once Fin came aboard, and Cabot was the ADA.
Melinda Warner (Medical Examiner)
Goren. His character always fascinated me and I was enthralled by the charisma in which Vincent D’Onofrio played him.
Eames, not so much. She was a pretty one-dimensional character and it was obvious her only purpose on the show was to serve as a wall for Goren to bounce his hypotheses off of. That, and I always felt that either Kathryn Erbe couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag or that she had absolutely no desire to make her character interesting.
I think the Eames character seems that way because she has to walk on eggs, being assigned an unpopular partner who is clearly a disturbed genius. She tries to work with Bobby while, at the same time, protecting her ass from the NYPD higher ups. Seems realistic enough for my TV tastes.
I disagree. I think Munch was funnier, and his wacky conspiracy theories were all his own. I vote Munch.