All characters are not created equal. Some people made their way into the opening credits and hung around the show for years while barely registering (Valerie Haywood, I'm looking at you), while others were so great in a handful of appearances -- or even once -- that viewers still talked about them long after they were gone.

Among my favorite recurring or one-shot characters:

• James Sinclair (Daniel Benzali): Bochco and Milch didn't want to spend much time in court to avoid duplicating all those Joyce Davenport scenes from "Hill Street Blues." Too bad; otherwise we might have gotten to enjoy even more of Sinclair, a slick, smug defense lawyer with a gift for making hostile witnesses hang themselves with their own words.

• Sgt. Martens (Scott Allan Campbell): Until Lt. Bale had his awkward Come to Jesus moment, Martens was the only Internal Affairs cop to be portrayed with an ounce of sympathy, often looking past indiscretions by our heroes if they didn't really matter. As he memorably said to Simone once, "Everything's a situation."

• Vinnie Greco (Joe Pantoliano): Ah, Joey Pants. Even in the early '90s, he was arguably too famous to be playing a recurring role as Lt. Fancy's favorite snitch, but he was friends with the producers, so we were lucky enough to enjoy three episodes with the sleazy, self-interested but fundamentally likable Vinnie. The show tried to replicate him with the likes of Steve Richards and Julian Pisano, but ain't nothing like the real thing.

• Ferdinand Hollie (Giancarlo Esposito): In between his writing of "Homicide" and his creation of "The Wire," David Simon took a break from Baltimore crime to pen season three's terrific "Hollie and the Blowfish," featuring honor-bound, HIV-positive stick-up man Ferdinand Hollie. You can look at Ferdinand as a dry run for Omar on "The Wire," but as played by Giancarlo Esposito, he was his own compelling man. Ferdinand's death is part of what makes the episode so good, but it's a shame we didn't get to spend more time with him.

• Patsy Ferrare (Brad Sullivan): The man who taught Bobby about pigeons, Patsy was a washed-up ex-fighter who, when we met him in season three's "Aging Bull," was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. I never expected to see him again, but Milch inserted him beautifully into the death of Simone arc as Bobby's fantasy guide to the afterlife.

• ADA Leo Cohen (Michael Buchman Silver: Maybe it was because I was a young wiseass myself, but I always liked Cohen a lot more than the detectives did. Frankly, he was the best riding DA the show ever had. There was always genuine tension between him and the cops, in part because, even as he was rudely disagreeing with our heroes, he seemed to have a point. There was a little of that in the early days with Sylvia, but once she and Andy hooked up, she was a friend to the squad, then a housewife, then a corpse. The writers tried to set up some conflict with Haywood and Munson, but it didn't really work.

• Henry Coffield (Willie Garson): Before he was trading bitchy one-liners with Sarah Jessica Parker, Willie Garson played one of the most memorable losers this show ever saw: pathetic, Coke bottle glasses wearing Henry Coffield, a distant relative of Bobby Simone's late wife and the superintendent of the apartment building Bobby inherited. Pairing giant, handsome, smooth Bobby with this jittery little weasel was a great odd coupling, whether Bobby was hurling Henry around the interview room cage or bending over backwards to get him out of a murder jam. And in one of the best subplots dealing with Diane's grief over Bobby's death, we discovered that Bobby had left his beloved pigeons to Henry, of all people -- mainly as an excuse for Henry and Diane to lean on each other as a dysfunctional little support system.

• Jimmy Liery (Chris Meloni): Started with a bang, ended with an off-screen whimper, but that's more a problem of plot mechanics than character. Liery, a charismatic gun dealer who first crossed paths with Diane during her undercover days, was one scary mother, even before he slipped her a mickey and carried her off into the night. He plays a cop now on "Special Victims Unit," but Chris Meloni was always at his best playing psychos like Liery or "Oz" sexual predator Chris Keller.

• Det. Harry Denby Scott Cohen: Even in the waning days of David Milch's tenure as the show's chief creative voice, when the plots made no sense and the characters all talked like they lived in a 19th century mining camp (minus the "Deadwood"-level cussing), the man still knew how to write a great drunk. Denby was practically sweating bourbon in every scene as he tried to woo Diane and screw over Jill and the rest of the cops, but there was such detail to Milch's writing and Scott Cohen's performance that he never seemed like a cartoon in the way that later villains like Fraker did.

(Author's note: Looking over this list, I can't help but notice the glaring absence of women on it. Part of that is because people like Sylvia and Donna and Kirkendall got promoted to regular status -- had Donna left the show after her first fling with Medavoy ended, she'd be an easy choice -- but part of it is because, as Amanda so eloquently points out in her essay on the women of Blue, the show featured very few memorable female characters. I don't want to blame it on sexism or misogyny, since Milch writes great female characters on Deadwood; for whatever reason, he rarely did it here.)

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