Hollywood Off-Ramp

Did You Know?

• Brian Unger was born in Dayton, Ohio and grew up in Granville, Ohio.
• He graduated from Ohio University in 1987, where he majored in communications.
• Unger disclosed publicly for the first time in 2023 that he is gay and married to former child actor Nicholas Phillips.

Career

Brian Unger, an original correspondent and producer on The Daily Show from 1996 to 1998, appeared on the anthology series Hollywood Off-Ramp. His other TV credits include O2Be, Reno 911!, The Man Show, various I Love the... specials on VH1, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and more. In 1998, Entertainment Weekly named him one of the 100 Most Creative People in Entertainment. He contributed regular commentary, called "The Unger Report," to NPR's Day to Day from its 2003 launch until its cancellation in 2009, with his final segment airing March 16, 2009.

He then provided commentary for NPR's All Things Considered from 2009 to 2012. Unger has hosted on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann and the Discovery Channel show Some Assembly Required, and co-hosted the pilot for PBS's Wired Science. He has been a spokesman for Yoo-hoo and Maxwell House Coffee, and in 2008 appeared in a BMW documentary about diesel testing on a 500-mile road trip from South Carolina to Virginia, later becoming the official spokesman for the BMW Advanced Diesel.

He also appears in recent Quicken Loans commercials. His written work has appeared in The New York Times and The Minneapolis Star Tribune, and he wrote a book review for The Washington Post. He is a commentator on The Young Turks, which aired on Current TV from 2011 to 2013. Unger narrated the PBS American version of Nature's Spy in the Wild and appeared alongside Kevin Costner on Yellowstone in 2019.

He hosted a History Channel documentary special, How the States Got Their Shapes, which became a weekly series in 2011. As of 2014, he co-hosts Showdown of the Unbeatables. He hosted an NFL.com segment called "Game Day Satisfaction: Week 1" as of September 8, 2013. Unger also joined the inaugural news staff of Atlanta's WUPA as a multimedia journalist, making his on-air debut on September 15.