Brooklyn 99’s Joe Lo Truglio offers a different kind of behind-the-scenes content on Instagram
You know him as Charles Boyle, Jake Peralta’s bumbling yet kind-hearted best friend on NBC’s Brooklyn 99. On Instagram, he’s the king of behind-the-scenes content.
Joe Lo Truglio’s Instagram strives to narrow the gap between the fans and the filmmaking. His feed graces followers with videos from the set of a network sitcom that grew beloved in the streaming era.
Lo Truglio embraced subtlety on May 21 when he shared a video describing his experience at the table read for the final episode of Brooklyn 99. He utilizes a catalogue of cartoonish facial expressions as man-child Charles Boyle but kept a straight face while he delivered a life lesson to his fans.
Most behind-the-scenes content paints a rosy picture of show business. Every ‘cut’ transitions to laughter, every scene wraps with a heartfelt speech from a cast member, stars have inside jokes with caterers. The footage scarcely offers insight into the challenges or nuances involved in the creative process, but Lo Truglio’s May 21 video did.
Here’s the summary:
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health protocols forced the Brooklyn 99 cast and crew to change their work routines. According to Lo Truglio, that included table reads where cast members zoomed from their studio lot dressing rooms.
Lo Truglio says he pictured the series finale table read for “so long.” He imagined, “How special it was gonna be, what that was gonna mean, all the things that would be said, the performance you were gonna give.”
The reality: Lo Truglio joined the table read from his laptop. His laptop froze, in the middle of the read, “just before my line. On a zoom with everyone.”
A wardrobe person brought in another laptop. It froze five minutes later. “Two laptops. Gone.”
The moment went off-script.
The life lesson? “You cannot picture what the moment will be. You cannot keep the picture in your head. What happens is, you can’t create the moment, and the moment creates you.”
The other life lesson? “Check your WiFi.”
Brooklyn 99 took a one-year break after the creators called for a rework of the series following the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent calls to end police brutality and dismantle systematic racism. The creators took a year to rewrite the season and address Black Lives Matter. During these rewrites, the creators decided to make Season 8 the show’s final season.
Chris Evangelista, a writer at Slash Film, likes to think that Brooklyn 99 takes place in an alternate universe. “It’s pretty obvious the cops on the show do not behave like real police officers.” In a time when law enforcement receives long-overdue scrutiny for maintaining racist institutions, it’s ironic to feed the public a police comedy. But Brooklyn 99 works because of the ‘alternate universe’ and because of its diversity. The show includes two black men (one of whom is gay), two Latina women (one of whom is bisexual), and Lo Truglio’s character, a heterosexual white guy who eschews toxic masculinity.
The season premieres August 12, 2021, at 8:00 and 8:30 pm on NBC. The official synopsis is, “Jake and the squad must try to balance their personal lives and their professional lives over the course of a very difficult year.”
