Dan Bucatinsky

Three careers run at once here, and acting is the smallest of them. Bucatinsky, born in New York in 1965, writes and produces as well as performing, and the credit list gives that away: a book, Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?, sits in the middle of the guest spots.

Scandal is the part most people know. As James Novak, a reporter married into the administration he is supposed to be covering, he took a role that could have been comic relief and turned it into the show's most compromised man, someone whose professional ethics and personal life were designed to destroy each other. It won him the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series in 2013.

The recurring register is the man who is quicker than the room and cannot resist proving it. That is Timothy in The Opposite of Sex, Billy in the HBO revival of The Comeback, which he also executive produced, Rob in Hacks, Kevin in Marry Me, Fred in How I Met Your Father, Andy Shalowitz in 24: Legacy, and Jerome Sokoloff across both versions of Web Therapy. Early television used him the same way in Cybill, Jenny, Significant Others, MDs and That '80s Show.

Film has mostly wanted him for a scene or two of pressure applied politely: Richard in Air, Arthur Coyle in Second Act, Leonard in Our Little Secret, Kip Gorman in The Grotto. He also turns up as himself with some regularity on Celebrity Name Game, 25 Words or Less and Pictionary, which is its own kind of Los Angeles career and nothing to apologise for.