Scandal star Dan Bucatinksy just announced to the world that he ripped the seam of his favorite skinny jeans, had a role in killing his daughter’s beloved bird (it was a genuine accident), and released a bunch of self-taped auditions for roles he didn’t get.
No, he didn’t lose an awful bet to expose his biggest fails to his almost 57,000 Instagram followers. He’s vowed to do so on purpose, every week, in an effort to combat doom-scrolling and social media perfectionism with his #FailureFridays series.
Bucatisnky was a recurring cast member on ABC’s Scandal alongside Kerry Washington and Tony Goldwyn for three seasons (with brief appearances in Seasons 4 and 6). He won an Emmy in 2013 for his role as James Novak, husband to the show’s most ruthless politician, Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry). He’s also a writer and producer with some impressive credits and a longtime producing partner of Lisa Kudrow.
But when the pandemic hit, Bucatinsky says he realized that social media was taking him down a negative rabbit hole.
“Once the whole world sort of shut down [during COVID], [even] the restart after that was particularly difficult,” Bucatinsky tells the Daily Beast. “We all started going back to work, me included, but there was just this, for me, a greater awareness of our powerlessness over certain things.”
While he was struggling to find acting work and get his pilots sold, all he’d see on Instagram was success stories from everyone else. Everything seemed perfect, for everyone else, all the time.
“There seems to be this endless scroll on Instagram and people using social media only for the big wins,” he says. “It started to create this false narrative that the world is winning, so that even when you have a bad day or you’ve had a negative setback, it somehow defines you.” A problem solver by nature, Bucatinsky set out to make people talk about things that “no one ever shares,” like when things don’t go their way. Cue his #FailureFridays series, where he posts weekly videos about things in his life that didn’t go as planned.
“Sometimes [the videos] are funny, sometimes they’re relatable, sometimes they’re mundane—cooking failures, weight loss failures, relationship failures, [or] a fight with our kid,” he says.
Since his first post, Bucatinsky quickly achieved his goal to get people talking. He’s gotten 70,000 shares across platforms and earned likes from celebs like Jennifer Aniston, Kristin Chenoweth, Courteney Cox, Retta, Jennifer Grey, Aisha Taylor, and more. What’s more, some viewers—both famous and not—are sharing their fails with Bucatinsky privately. “I’m waiting for that moment where people are like, ‘Alright, here’s mine,’ and they post it,” he adds.
While the series is a “cathartic” exercise for Bucatinsky for now, he hopes it can be a small part of a larger societal move away from social media’s self-image fixation—a trend he thinks has played right into Donald Trump’s hand.
“The whole Trump narrative is a delusional sense of one’s own accomplishment and self-image,” Bucatinsky says. Trump’s rise “has to do with a much greater polarization that’s happening in our world,” he explains, “where people have to be one or another of anything—we’re either winners or losers, we succeeded or we failed. It’s black or it’s white, we’re men or we’re women. People are not embracing the nuance, and I think Trump is speaking to a fear and speaking a narrative to people that is very binary.”
He sees the connection between that binary thinking and what social media has evolved into. “We should be using social media to inspire each other to talk about the setbacks and how we get back up, because that’s really where life is happening,” he says. “It is very scary every Friday to think, ‘Oh God, what is this gonna make me look like?’ The impulse is always, ‘Is this gonna paint me out as a loser?’” But it’s worth the risk, he says, if it gets others in on breaking down that binary line that leaves society more vulnerable to figures who can exploit it.
Scandal fans remember that the show embraced the theater of its fictional world of politics, often in somewhat outlandish ways—but according to Bucatinsky, with the rise of Trump the show’s plot lines have started to seem less outlandish in comparison to real-world American politics right now. “[Scandal] was a really fun and almost unbelievable, outlandish imagination of what crazy things can happen in politics and how far people would go for power, and then we quite literally started living it.” The memes speak for themselves.
“The stories that we told on Scandal in some ways became real and I think people are thinking back to that a lot now,” he said. The cast of the show, which went off the air in 2018, is often politically outspoken. Kerry Washington and Tony Goldwyn each hosted one night of the Democratic National Convention in August, at one point taking the stage together to rekindle their on-screen chemistry.
Capitalizing on the show’s continued popularity and its relevance in the minds of fans, Bucatinsky is joining the rest of the cast for a campaign event in Detroit this weekend to help get out the vote for Kamala Harris. “We are helping the campaign with local and state elections—phone banks, social media,” he says. “We’re just trying to build awareness for the Harris-Walz campaign and also to get as many people out voting as possible.”
