A television writer whose name is on Friends, How I Met Your Mother and Angie Tribeca, and whose own taste shows only on the last: the straightest of faces, the silliest of jokes, and too many of both at once.
Fi1m perspective
Start with Rashida Jones not smiling. In Angie Tribeca (2016) she plays a detective who delivers every line as if it were evidence, while the station around her fills with sight gags, bad puns and props that have no business in a police station. The gag is the gap between her and everything else, and Ira Ungerleider, who wrote and directed episodes and ran the show, is the man who kept that gap open. He has said of the cast that "I’m the disciplinarian that won’t let anyone smile, wink or give a face like, ‘Oh that was crazy.’" That rule is the best thing in the series.
It took him a long time to get his own name on anything. He began on Phenom in 1993 and the next year was one of ten writers in the first Friends writers' room, where he stayed through the first three seasons, writing The One with the Butt, The One with the Fake Monica and The One Where No One's Ready and rising to producer by the second and third. He created Jesse (1998), a multi-camera sitcom for Christina Applegate that ran two years, wrote Best Prom Ever for How I Met Your Mother (2005), and then spent a decade on shows most people will not remember: The Loop, Gary Unmarried, Friends with Benefits, Mixology. The turn came with Resident Advisors (2015), where he directed the whole short run, and Angie Tribeca the year after. Since then he has directed and produced on Dollface (2019) and is writing on DMV (2025).
The honest difficulty with a writer on a long-running sitcom is that the show gets the credit, not the writer. Our review of Friends praises six matched performances and Jennifer Aniston's gift for embarrassment; it has nothing to say about which writer did what, because nobody can. The same is true of How I Met Your Mother, where we liked the construction and Neil Patrick Harris and found the writing pleased with itself. Angie Tribeca is the one place where the choices are plainly his, and they are a mixed lot. The seriousness works: Jones treated as if she were in a straight procedural, the Carells' spoof shot like the thing it mocks. The volume does not. He has spoken of sixty jokes a page, and it shows; the series fires faster than it can aim. We laughed, properly, at the first two episodes we watched, and by the fifth the jokes had stopped registering as jokes and become noise, and we were slightly cross at a show this clever for not trusting a joke to land before throwing the next.
What he has not yet made is a comedy that is both his and about people. Jesse was an attempt; Dollface, which he produced and directed an episode of, leans on quirk where character should be. His method, deadpan at the centre and chaos around it, is a good one, and The Naked Gun proved long ago that it can carry a feature. Watch Angie Tribeca two episodes at a time, no more, and you will see what he can do when somebody is finally letting him.
Biography
Ira Ungerleider is a television producer, writer and director. He worked as a writer on the NBC series Friends (1994), contributing to eight episodes across the first three seasons, and later as a producer on the show.
He created the sitcom Jesse (1998) and has held executive producer or co-executive producer roles on series including How I Met Your Mother (2005), Friends with Benefits (2011), Angie Tribeca (2016) and Dollface (2019). Ungerleider received a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Comedy Series.
