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The top headline on the online edition of this newspaper for most of yesterday was, "December manufacturing sales plummet." Just a wee bit down the page was this: "Japan's economy shrinks at fastest rate in 35 years."

How the hell did we get here?

The thing is, looking at what has happened in the past 12 months is like reading an experimental novel. You can pick your own narrative to follow. You can pick a character to follow and ignore others. You can decide what day or what event was most significant.

Me, I'm picking Sept. 17, 2008. Now, it's perfectly possible that you don't remember much about what you were doing on Wednesday, Sept. 17, of last year. As it happens, I remember the day well. I worked and then celebrated my birthday.

I didn't pay much attention to the fact that the Dow was down 449 points when the New York Stock Exchange closed. It was the third straight day of the Dow closing about 500 points down. On the Monday, the investment bank Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy protection after the U.S. government refused to bail it out. But on Tuesday, the U.S. government had indicated it would rescue the insurance company AIG with an $85-billion loan, taking a 79.9-per-cent stake in the company and, essentially, nationalizing it.

Whatever was happening in the financial world on the Wednesday, it amounted to inertia. Like a blank page in a novel. Banks stopped lending money. They just stopped.

Next day, at a meeting in Washington, Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, called a meeting of members of Congress. He had a plan. His audience was skeptical. And then he said, "If we don't do this tomorrow, then we won't have an economy on Monday."

Frontline: Inside the Meltdown (PBS, 9 p.m.) starts with that meeting and emphasizes the drama of the moment when Bernanke made that statement. A person at the meeting says, "There was literally a pause in the room. The oxygen just left."

From there, the program goes backwards for a while, to the collapse of the investment bank Bear Stearns in March of last year. The evaporation of Bear Stearns was, for many people, the first indication that there might be something wrong with the financial system in the United States. As one commentator in the program puts it, "Bear Stearns was stuffed to the gills with toxic waste." By "toxic waste," he means intricate debt instruments linked to the shaky subprime mortgage market.

This Frontline is a fascinating, gripping hour that chronicles how everything unravelled in six months. It is filmed and paced like a thriller. And yet the enemy - the subprime mess - is essentially unseen. The program views the collapse into recession as a personal drama involving Bernanke and U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. It presents the narrative of the collapse as a series of crucial decisions made in increasingly fraught circumstances. Those decisions were guided by pragmatism, then ideology, pragmatism again, then ideology again and, finally, utter and inexplicable rage and desperation.

As this program tells it, the refusal of Paulson and Bernanke to bail out Lehman Brothers caused the credit crunch that caused the recession. And it suggests that the decision about Lehman Brothers was based on the principle of "moral hazard" - that by bailing out investment banks that took risks, the government would commit the morally repugnant mistake of encouraging more risky behaviour in the financial system.

This is an appealing narrative, a story arc that fits, but many viewers will find it very dubious. Much of what we see, in film footage and still images, is in black and white, to heighten the stark drama of what was unfolding last year. The most memorable image is probably that of the stunned face of Dick Fuld, the Lehman boss who was widely viewed as one of Wall Street's smartest honchos. His face is frozen in disbelief because he's realized that Paulson is not going to save his company.

While the program is deeply critical of Paulson, especially in his selective use of the "moral hazard" argument, it isn't half as hard on people like Fuld. The viewer gets the feeling that Paulson was disinclined to recognize reality for many months. The viewer knows, though, that for years Fuld and his fellow Wall Street honchos were out of touch with reality.

The great thing about this Frontline is you don't have to accept it as a story told by a reliable narrator. It's like part of an experimental novel. It's only part of the intricate story. It presents Paulson as a villain. We can figure that, maybe, others were far more villainous. The worst thing about the program is that, watching it, we know we are all the victims.

Check local listings.

jdoyle@globeandmail.com ****

Also airing tonight

American Idol (Fox, CTV,

8 p.m.) is at a crucial point - the first 12 of the 36 semifinalists perform. Viewer voting begins after this two-hour edition. Recently, Cécile Frot-Coutaz, CEO of Idol production company FremantleMedia, told the L.A. Times, "These are hard times we are going through. American Idol is a comfort food. It's a positive show. You'll laugh, you'll cry. In times like this, people gravitate to shows like that." Indeed.

East Bound & Down (HBO Canada, 8:30 p.m.) is a new comedy, produced by actor Will Ferrell: "Relief pitcher Kenny Powers (Danny McBride) was poised to rule the Big Leagues, but two things got in the way: his fading fastball and his insufferable personality. After a spectacular career flame-out, Kenny came home to Shelby County, N.C., and picked up a job as a substitute gym teacher. He's spent every moment since then cashing in the last of his dying fame while plotting his inevitable comeback ... one beer at a time." J.D.

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