Ellen Gray, Philadelphia Daily News
"... a nail-biter. Producer Michael Kirk and others take us inside Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in the final days and hours when things fell apart. They then follow the crisis to Congress and Treasury, explaining as clearly as I've heard yet both the bailout and the mess that made it necessary. ..."
Sam Allis, The Boston Globe
"... provides the clearest explanation I've seen of how last year's catastrophic collapse occurred. It's an indispensable primer on the financial carnage. ... Kudos to Kirk for the clarity of his writing and to Jim Gilmore for heroic reporting."
Heather Havrilesky, Salon.com
"... a fascinating blow-by-blow of last year's crisis and the emergency gambits performed along the way. ..."
David Zurawik, The Baltimore Sun
"... one of the finest hours of nonfiction TV that I have ever seen in 30 years of writing about the medium ... This is as good as TV or any other kind of journalism gets."
Alessandra Stanley, The New York Times
"... a post-traumatic-stress flashback: a searing look at how the treasury secretary at the time, Henry M. Paulson Jr., and others acted -- and failed to act ...
... "Frontline" builds a persuasive case against Mr. Paulson but relies for the most part on secondary sources to do so: academics and reporters. ..."
Michelle Archer, USA Today
"Writer/director Michael Kirk crisply packages the dramatic events of the current economic crisis ... illuminating and sobering ..."
Dave Shiflett, Bloomberg.Com
"… the show does explain how personality clashes and ideological passions probably made a bad situation worse. ... But "Meltdown" fails to examine how Congress helped create the subprime problem through its cozy relationship with Fannie Mae. ..."
John Doyle, The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ont.)
"... a fascinating, gripping hour that chronicles how everything unravelled in six months. It is filmed and paced like a thriller. ..."
Alan Pergament, The Buffalo News
"... does a fascinating, suspenseful job explaining the scary economic past, the complicated present and the uncertain future ..."
Alex Strachan, Canwest News Service
"... sober, clear-headed … must-see TV in these financially troubled times."
Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters.com
"... Part investigation, part damn scary story, the program suggests that events unfolded as they did largely because of the personalities involved. ..."
Roger Caitlin, The Hartford Courant
"... a good explainer for the current crisis. The only drawback is that few of the principals ... are available for interviews; a lot of the interview subjects are journalists covering the meltdown."
Mary Delach Leonard, The St. Louis Beacon
"... producer Michael Kirk has captured the shock and awe of those days in September when the nation learned it was on the brink of an economic collapse that could approach last century's Great Depression in scale. ..."
Adrienne Johnson Martin, The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.)
"... You get a sense of the humans behind this numbers story."