Charles Boyle

Charles Boyle is a detective at Brooklyn's 99th Precinct, hopelessly devoted to his job and even more hopelessly devoted to his best friend Jake Peralta, whom he idolizes with an intensity Jake finds equal parts touching and alarming. He's earnest, food-obsessed, socially oblivious, and utterly without cynicism in a squad room full of it.

The joke could easily be cruelty toward a hapless sidekick, but Lo Truglio plays Boyle's weirdness — the elaborate food opinions, the naked emotional openness, the total lack of self-protection — with such sincerity that it becomes sweetness instead. He's the show's proof that decency and strangeness aren't opposites.