‘Inside the Meltdown,” which airs tonight on WGBH, provides the clearest explanation I’ve seen of how last year’s catastrophic collapse of our economy occurred. It is an indispensable primer on the financial carnage.

As the title of the program connotes, this is an insider’s view of the story. We get knowing analysis by experts speaking in plain English, rather than unfathomable Wall Street argot.

Michael Kirk, the gifted documentarian who wrote, directed, and produced “Meltdown,” provides the other element crucial to a good story: tick-tock – the term journalists use for close linear coverage of a chain of events. Kudos to Kirk for the clarity of his writing and to Jim Gilmore for heroic reporting.

The pacing of the show moves crisply through the series of nightmares. There is tension throughout the one-hour program despite the fact that we know vaguely what happened. more

If you can work out some of those details in advance — especially checking scheduling? Then you do. And that’s what a lot of this is. The Bolten/Miers thing deals with their holdover assertion of privilege which, I gather from any number of places, the Obama folks are nudging them to work out…or they’ll step in and work it out for them, which the Bush people will not want to happen. So they’ll most likely work something out beforehand.

It’s like litigation, but a higher level of hardball involved.

The only question at this point on executive privilege that’s still open-ended has more to do with the Miers/Bolten testimony than anything else — that’s what’s still dangling out for negotiations, per my source — and those negotiations are active. Just FYI.