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I don't fully understand the working of the derivatives and credit swaps we've heard so much about. But I'm learning. These are ingenious, computer-driven schemes in which good money can be earn-ed from bad debt, and Wall Street's Masters of the Universe pocket untold millions while they bankrupt their investors and their companies.

This process is explained in Charles Ferguson's “Inside Job,” an angry, well-argued documentary about how the American financial industry set out deliberately to defraud the ordinary American investor. The crucial error was to allow financial institutions to trade on their own behalf. Today, many large trading banks are betting against their own customers.

In the real estate market, banks aggressively promoted mortgages to people who could not afford them. These were assembled in packages. They were carried on the books as tangible assets when they were worthless. The institutions assembling them hedged their loans by betting against them. When the mortgages failed, profits were made despite and because of their failure. This process has been targeted by financial reform measures that many in both parties oppose because — well, lobbyists have persuaded them. There is no moral justification for how Wall Street functions today.

A Chicago group named Magnetar was particularly successful in creating such poisoned instruments for the sole purpose of hedging against them. Most of the big Wall Street players knew exactly what the “Magnetar Trade” was and welcomed it. The more mortgages failed, the more money they made. They actually continued to sell the bad mortgages to their clients as good investments. There was a famous exchange on C-SPAN as Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) grilled Daniel Sparks, head of the Goldman Sachs mortgages department, on why the company aggressively sold investments its own traders described to one another as “shitty.” It was entertaining to watch Sparks maintain a facade of studious probity as Levin socked him with the word “shitty” again and again.

This Wall Street climate helps to explain one session of Senate testimony I have been fascinated by for almost two years: How Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, was able to defend the $484 million bonus he received after leading his firm into bankruptcy. Lawrence MacDonald, who wrote a book on Lehman's collapse, said on “PBS NewsHour”: “Fuld's driver would call Lehman Brothers, and one of the elevators in the building would become frozen. A security guard would come over and hold it until Mr. Fuld arrived in the back door. There's only 15 feet where King Richard Fuld is exposed to the rabble, I guess you'd call us.”

Some may say, well, he was the boss. I say, who the hell did he think he was? I've waited for elevators with my bosses, who have included Marshall Field and Rupert Murdoch. They seemed content enough that there was an elevator.

One of the most fascinating aspects of “Inside Job” involves the chatty on-camera insights of Kristin Davis , a Wall Street madam, who says the Street operated in a climate of abundant sex and cocaine for valued clients and the traders themselves. She says it was an accepted part of the corporate culture that hookers at $1,000 an hour and up were kept on retainer, that cocaine was the fuel and that she and her girls didn't understand how some traders could even function on the trading floor after most nights.

That leads me to the matter of financial reform. We need it. We need to return to an era of transparency. We need to restore a market of investments that are what they seem to be. We need to deprive investment banks of the right to trade on behalf of their own accounts. We need to require them to work on behalf of their customers. In the days before deregulation, it was hard to get a mortgage from a bank that didn't believe you could make the payments. It recent years, it was hard not to get one.

The bad mortgages were sliced and diced into so many derivatives that the banks themselves had no idea what paper they were holding. In one of the more refreshing moments during the housing meltdown, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) advised her constituents: “If a bank forecloses on you, don't move and demand they produce a copy of your mortgage. In many cases, they can't.” She was prophetic; banks are now halting foreclosures all over the country.

Gene Siskel, who was a wise man, gave me the best investment advice I've ever received. “You can never outsmart the market, if that's what you're trying to do,” he said. “Find something you love, for reasons you understand, that not everyone agrees with you about, and put your money in it.” The stocks I thought of were Apple, Google and Steak 'n Shake. I bought some shares. That was a long time ago. Reader, if I had invested every penny I had on Gene's advice, today I would be a Master of the Universe.

Revised from my Cannes 2010 blog entry.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Inside Job (2010)

Rated Unrated for some drug and sex-related material

109 minutes

Directed and written by

• Charles Ferguson

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Screen Rant's Kofi Outlaw reviews Inside Job

Inside Job is the newest documentary from Charles Ferguson, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind No End in Sight , a  documentary that pondered the long-term impact of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

With Inside Job , Ferguson once again performs a much needed public service, piercing the veils of mass media and politics in order to offer a comprehensive and accessible look at the root causes behind the 2008 global economic crisis.

Politics were raging back in 2008, but no matter what side of that line you stood on, all Americans (and many citizens of the world beyond our borders) were gripped by fear as the American economy (and thereafter the global economy) ground to a halt with the collapse of AIG, one the largest insurance corporations in America.

The crisis began when (and I'm delivering a very simplified version of this) AIG's credit ratings were discovered to be worth far less than many within the financial services industry had speculated and traded on. All of a sudden, the largest insurance corporation in America was being called on to cover the cost of loans and debts it had no money to pay for. This led to one of the cornerstones of the American economy being crippled, trillions in investment losses, and a mystery that no one in a position of power (including America's new president) seemed able to answer - namely, why did this happen ?

Well, some two years later as the world is still trying to sift its way out of this latest Wall Street blunder, Charles Ferguson is doing what so many world leaders and economists could not: explaining how Wall Street cause global economic near-collapse in clear, concise terms that any layman could understand.

With methodical precision, Ferguson looks at American investment policies of the past decades and how those policies were deregulated over time, giving rise to an age of speculative investment banking, high-stakes trading, and the mad-dash for big fortunes which fuels it all.

There are two aspects of Inside Job which truly distinguish it as a great documentary: the organized manner in which Ferguson presents his information and the cast of "characters" he has interviewed.

As to the former: Ferguson wisely uses time as his guide, looking at the history and progression of the U.S. financial sector - from a highly regulated system of simple borrow/lender relations, to the complicated system of high-risk loans and derivatives it is today. Here are the epochs of history that serve as the documentary's "chapters":

• 1930s - 1979 - Post-Depression era of "Traditional American finance." A look at all the safeguards put in place in wake of the Depression that kept financial services resigned to a simple system of borrowers and lenders (banks) who actually had the money to lend. Bankers and traders earned income that matched most working Americans.
• 1980s - Reagan era of laissez-faire business and trickle-down economics. The deregulation of Wall Street and the savings and loan industry leads to less oversight, and soon after multiple cases of fraud, insider trading and bad loans/investments that lead to massive losses.
• 1990s - Clinton era and the bridge between Washington and Wall Street. More and more Wall Street CEOs infiltrate the government, taking up administrative positions. Depression era safeguards are repealed, allowing for huge Wall Street mergers and new laws favoring the financial services industry. The derivatives industry is created, which Wall Street government administrators refuse to regulate. Bankers/traders now make huge commissions off "junk deals" that lead to the Dot-com bubble burst. The financial sector is ultimately given a slap on the wrist.
• 2000s - The Bush era of further deregulation and relaxed enforcement. With lax laws on regulation and oversight, more and more cases of heavy lobbying, fraud, inflated speculation and unethical practices arise. Complex systems of investment are created, which tie everything from mortgages to credit up in the risky practices of the financial services industry. The result:  inflated speculation and unethical practices by the nation's leading finance, insurance and credit rating agencies, leading to the 2008 economic collapse.
• 2008 - The Great Recession. A look at the fall of dominoes that brought down America's biggest financial, insurance and credit rating agencies. Corrupt CEOs and their cohorts still walk away with massive fortunes, and more than a few of them still hold government positions.
• 2010 - The Obama era: Business as usual. A look at how - despite all the campaign promises of "Change we can believe in" - the Obama administration is in fact employing the very same Wall Street execs-turned-government administrators who have pitched the U.S. into multiple financial crises over multiple decades of unethical practices.

As you can see, this documentary doesn't get bogged down in the illusions of politics, but rather pierces that veil to reveal the truth: that there is very specific sector of American industry that has repeatedly proven toxic when left unregulated and unattended. To quote a great man, " Cash rules everything around me... " Politics be damned.

Continue to the "characters" and criticisms of Inside Job ...

The "characters" that Ferguson features in his documentary are by far the most interesting and engaging aspect of the film. That "cast" includes:

• Multiple economists ranging from those who have been warning for years about the dangerous practices of Wall Street, to those who have been downplaying that danger.
• Bankers/Traders - both the moral and immoral types.
• Government officials who have direct ties to the financial sector.
• Educators from top universities who are involved (often unethically) with the financial sector.
• Advocates of social reform and justice.
• Foreign economists/government officials who have mapped the ripple effect of Wall Street malpractice.
• A psychotherapist who treats Wall Street execs and the escorts who service them.
• A madam whose primary clientele was Wall Street execs.

Truly, some of Inside Job 's best moments come from the unexpected detours Ferguson takes into the psychology and seedy private behavior of high-ranking Wall Street types. A definite pattern quickly emerges in which the same people who are thrilled by high-stakes investing and ludicrous greed are equally thrilled by money, drugs and prostitutes, often at taxpayer expense. The two worlds - financial services and illicit vice - seemingly go hand-in-hand.

Another big revelation of this film: some of the people responsible for the "academic stamp of approval" that legitimizes many fraudulent reports published by Wall Street are the same people heading up America's leading business schools today (Yale, Harvard, Columbia, etc...). In fact, Ferguson's interviews with two of these esteemed academic names about their obvious unethical behavior are so damning that I'm not sure the two men will keep their jobs should this film gain notoriety. It's a clear case of journalistic victory, captured on camera.

If I have to criticize Inside Job it has to be on two points: first, there is a ton of material that Ferguson presents, but a lot of the social impact is only discussed superficially. Of course, looking at every ripple caused by the global financial crisis of 2008 would result in a three to four-hour documentary, and admittedly Ferguson is wiser to stay tightly focused on his primary subject (the financial services sector). But despite offering viewers a concise narrative, you can't watch Inside Job without getting the nagging feeling that there's much more going on that ties into what Ferguson is discussing; not getting that correlating info can be a bit frustrating at times.

The same goes for the lack of commentary from many of the major players (top CEOs turned government officials) being discussed int the film. While Ferguson does manage to get commentary from an impressive array of specialists, not having some of the top dogs on record robs the film of being an indisputably objective and complete look at this subject.

The second criticism I have is with Ferguson's choice of narrator for the film: actor Matt Damon. Sure, Damon's voice will be a welcome guide for many viewers, but having a well-known actor with pronounced liberal views speaking for what is essentially a non-partisan film is a misstep, in my opinion. Damon's presence will give easily-swayed or politically fundamental viewers an excuse to slap this film with the label of "liberal propaganda" based on that celebrity association alone, and this film is far from being partisan in any way.

Those small criticisms aside, Inside Job is an accomplishment that does what a great documentary should: present an important societal topic in a way that is accessible and comprehensive to a mainstream audience. And, as the film states in its final moments, the continuing malpractices of Wall Street are a crime for which few have been punished, but damage of which continues to threaten our very way of life. We've been officially warned.

Watch the trailer for Inside Job to help you make up your mind:

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Movie Review | 'Inside Job'

Who Maimed the Economy, and How

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By A.O. Scott

• Oct. 7, 2010

As I was watching “Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson’s meticulous and infuriating documentary about the causes and consequences of the financial crisis of 2008, an odd, archaic sentence kept popping into my head. The words come from the second chapter of “The Scarlet Letter” and are spoken in frustration and disgust by an old Puritan woman who watches Hester Prynne, publicly disgraced but without any sign of remorse, making her way from Salem’s prison to a scaffold in its market square. She “has brought shame upon us all,” the anonymous woman remarks. “Is there not law for it?”

“Inside Job,” a sleek, briskly paced film whose title suggests a heist movie, is the story of a crime without punishment, of an outrage that has so far largely escaped legal sanction and societal stigma. The betrayal of public trust and collective values that Mr. Ferguson chronicles was far more brazen and damaging than the adultery in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, which treated Hester more as scapegoat than villain.

The gist of this movie, which begins in a mood of calm reflection and grows angrier and more incredulous as it goes on, is unmistakably punitive. The density of information and the complexity of the subject matter make “Inside Job” feel like a classroom lecture at times, but by the end Mr. Ferguson has summoned the scourging moral force of a pulpit-shaking sermon. That he delivers it with rigor, restraint and good humor makes his case all the more devastating.

He is hardly alone in making it. Numerous journalists have published books and articles retracing the paths that led the world economy to the precipice two years ago. The deregulation of the financial services industry in the 1980s and ’90s; the growing popularity of complex and risky derivatives; the real estate bubble and the explosion of subprime lending — none of these developments were exactly secret. On the contrary, they were celebrated as vindications of the power and wisdom of markets. Accordingly, Mr. Ferguson recycles choice moments of triumphalism, courtesy of Lawrence H. Summers , George W. Bush, Alan Greenspan and various cable television ranters and squawkers.

Even as stock indexes soared and profits swelled, there were always at least a few investors, economists and government officials who warned that the frenzied speculation was leading to the abyss. Some of these prophets without honor show up in front of Mr. Ferguson’s camera, less to gloat than to present, once again, the analyses that were dismissed and ignored by their peers for so long.

Dozens of interviews — along with news clips and arresting aerial shots of New York, Iceland and other disaster areas — are folded into a clear and absorbing history, narrated by Matt Damon. The music (an opening song, “Big Time,” by Peter Gabriel, and a score by Alex Heffes) and the clean wide-screen cinematography provide an aesthetic polish that is welcome for its own sake and also important to the movie’s themes. The handsomely lighted and appointed interiors convey a sense of the rarefied, privileged worlds in which the Wall Street operators and their political enablers flourished, and the elegance of the presentation also subliminally bolsters the film’s authority. This is not a piece of ragged muckraking or breathless advocacy. It rests its outrage on reason, research and careful argument.

The same was true of Mr. Ferguson’s previous documentary, “No End in Sight,” which focused on catastrophic policies carried out in Iraq by President George W. Bush’s administration just after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But whereas that film concentrated on a narrow view of a complex subject — the conduct of the war rather than the at least equally controversial rationale for fighting it — “Inside Job” offers a sweeping synthesis, going as far back as the Reagan administration and as far afield as Iceland in its anatomy of the financial crisis.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the highest-profile players declined to be interviewed. Mr. Summers appears only in news footage, and none of his predecessors or successors as Treasury secretary — not Robert E. Rubin or Henry M. Paulson Jr. or Timothy F. Geithner — submit to Mr. Ferguson’s questions. Nor do any of the top executives at Goldman Sachs or the other big banks. Most of the interviewees are, at least from the perspective of the filmmaker, friendly witnesses, adding fuel to the director’s comprehensive critique of the way business has been done in the United States and the other advanced capitalist countries for the past two decades.

Both American political parties are indicted; “Inside Job” is not simply another belated settling of accounts with Mr. Bush and his advisers, though they are hardly ignored. The scaling back of government oversight and the weakening of checks on speculative activity by banks began under Reagan and continued during the Clinton administration. And with each administration the market in derivatives expanded, and alarms about the dangers of this type of investment were ignored. Raghuram Rajan, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, presented a paper in 2005 warning of a “catastrophic meltdown” and was mocked as a “Luddite” by Mr. Summers.

Meanwhile, some investment bankers — at Goldman Sachs in particular — were betting against the positions they were pushing on their customers. An elaborate house of cards had been constructed in which bad consumer loans were bundled into securities, which, were certified as sound by rating agencies paid by the banks and then insured via credit-default swaps. One risky bet was stacked on top of another , and in retrospect the collapse of the whole edifice, along with the loss of jobs, homes, pensions and political confidence, seems inevitable.

How did this happen? Mr. Ferguson is no conspiracy theorist; nor is he inclined toward structural or systemic explanations. Markets are not like tectonic plates, shifting on their own. Visible hands write laws and make deals, and in this case a combination of warped values and groupthink seems to have driven very intelligent men (and they were mostly men) toward folly. In addition to business and government, Mr. Ferguson aims his critique at academia, suggesting that the discipline of economics and more than a few prominent economists were corrupted by consulting fees, seats on boards of directors and membership in the masters of the universe club.

When he challenges some of these professors, in particular those who held positions of responsibility in the White House or in the Federal Reserve, they are reduced to stammering obfuscation — Markets are complicated! Who could have predicted? I don’t see any conflict of interest — and occasionally provoked to testiness. Mr. Ferguson, for his part, cannot always contain his incredulity or rein in his sarcasm. Occasionally his voice pipes up from off camera, saying things like, “You can’t be serious!”

But it is hard to imagine a movie more serious, and more urgent, than “Inside Job.” There are a few avenues that might have been explored more thoroughly, in particular the effects of the crisis on ordinary, non-Wall-Street-connected workers and homeowners. The end of the film raises a disturbing question, as Mr. Damon exhorts viewers to demand changes in the status quo so that the trends associated with unchecked speculation of the kind that caused the last crisis — rising inequality, neglect of productive capacity, endless cycles of boom and bust — might be reversed.

This call to arms makes you wonder why anger of the kind so eloquently expressed in “Inside Job” has been so inchoate. And through no fault of its own, the film may leave you dispirited as well as enraged. Its fate is likely to be that of other documentaries: praised in some quarters, nitpicked in others and shrugged off by those who need its message most. Which is a shame.

“Inside Job” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Some drug and sex references and pervasive obscenity, though not the verbal kind.

An earlier version of this review misidentified the chapter of "The Scarlet Letter" in which the quotation cited from the book appears. It is Chapter 2, not the first chapter.

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this review misidentified the opening song by Peter Gabriel. It is not "Sledgehammer."

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Inside Job: movie review

Matt Damon narrates 'Inside Job,' a meticulous exploration of what led to the crash of 2008.

• By Peter Rainer Film Critic

October 22, 2010

There have been plenty of books, articles, and movies about the 2007-08 financial meltdown and what led up to it, but if you're looking for a first-rate all-in-one overview, it doesn't get much better than Charles Ferguson 's "Inside Job."

With scrupulous fairness, Ferguson meticulously lays out for us the whole sordid mess: the deregulation of the financial-services industry that began in the '80s under President Reagan , the derivatives, insurance swaps, real-estate bubbles, subprime lending scams, institutions like A.I.G., Citigroup , Goldman Sachs – it's all here.

Many heavy-duty players from administrations past and present, including Alan Greenspan , Lawrence Summers , Henry Paulson , and Ben Bernanke chose not to be interviewed for the film (which is narrated by Matt Damon ). Those who were, like Harvard 's Martin Feldstein and Glenn Hubbard , former economic adviser to George W. Bush and now dean of Columbia University Business School , probably wish they hadn't. Their evasions are mind-boggling.

And, need I say, infuriating. Several of those who at the time warned of impending disaster are also interviewed. Nouriel Roubini , of New York University , is particularly eloquent. Raghuram Rajan , former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund , talks about a paper he delivered in 2005 warning of an "economic meltdown," for which he was branded a "Luddite" by Summers.

Ferguson previously directed the marvelous documentary "No End in Sight," which anatomized the disastrous US policies in Iraq following the fall of Saddam Hussein . In "Inside Job," which is equally good in its own way, he keeps the charts and graphs to a minimum. Despite the potentially brain-numbing complications of his subject, I had no trouble following the sickening spiral of deceit and arrant aggrandizement that led to trillions of dollars of losses and, to date, not a single prison sentence.

My only criticism of the film is its somewhat ahistorical bent: Not much is said about the robber barons and crooks of earlier eras – as if all this chicanery had no antecedents. And Ferguson doesn't give sufficient voice to those who actually have suffered from this "inside job." The film is told almost entirely from the perspective of the "players."

As is so often the case with crusading documentaries about sociopolitical malfeasance, the film's climactic entreaties to rise up and fix the world ring a bit tinny – but only because the enormity of what we have been witnessing seems so much more imposing than our means to change it. Grade: A- ( Rated PG-13 for some drug- and sex-related material.)

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Den of Geek

Inside Job review

The global financial crisis is the subject of a slick, feature-length Oscar-nominated documentary. Inside Job is both informative and bleak, writes Michael...

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There are few tougher propositions in the film world than the feature-length documentary. To stand out, and, seemingly, to impress the Academy, documentaries need to be helped by the cult of personality (Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine , Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth ), high production values ( March Of The Penguins ) or a crowd-pleasing tone ( Man On Wire , The Cove ). Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job , a compelling account of the recent global financial crisis, is obviously aiming high, ticking off each quality to almost fatal effect.

A thrilling opening, using the economic bubble of Iceland as a starting point, asserts itself through fast-paced editing, a score that takes cues from Hans Zimmer, and cinematography that, to be honest, has no place in this tale of boardrooms, bankers and bailouts.

As the opening credits roll, we’re hit by the one-two punch of comfort food licensed music choices (Peter Gabriel’s Big Time ) and sumptuous aerial shots of New York City, London, Shanghai, and other international business centres. Such slickness, plus the film’s backing by Sony Pictures Classics, gives Inside Job an immediate air of professionalism, one that is, thankfully, mirrored in Ferguson’s approach as a documentarian.

While not mincing words or failing to lay blame where it is due, the film safely sidesteps the cheap demagoguery of Moore, with the filmmaker’s voice taking a backseat to compelling infographics, eloquent talking heads, and the soothing, familiar voice of Matt Damon.

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This production gloss and the recurring cast of academics, commentators and politicians, help to keep the film together, as Ferguson’s ambitions at times threaten to pull it apart. Over five chapters, he recounts the history of the collapse, not only going into great, informative depth about the risk-based strategies that put the global economy on the line, but looks back to the rise of the financial industry itself.

This makes Inside Job both a treatise on predatory lending, CDOs, derivatives and mortgage fraud, and an overview of the last thirty years of banking, which is given the overtones of a moral fable, where greed and the drive for higher profits has created a rift in society, leading Wall Street and its associated institutions to gamble with the fortunes of others.

However, beneath this veneer of respectability lies Inside Job ‘s most surprising asset, an unpredictable sense of non-partisan anger. After leaning on the arguments of academics for the majority of the film, Ferguson takes great delight in turning the critical eye on them, in a frightening sequence that reveals just how intertwined the financial industry, the advisory committees in Washington DC and the schools of economics throughout the country are.

These voices, some of which have offered ways of framing and understanding this mess, are suddenly shown to be somewhat complicit, and watching their previously genial faces turn sour is delightful, even if it exposes the complicated nature of the situation.

Previously, lobbyists and spokespeople for the banks were easy targets, with simple humour teased from their stubborn doublethink and euphemistic talk. But, in the end, it seems no one can be trusted. Even Obama, who for some represented change and hope, is criticised in the final act as heading a “Wall Street government”.

Inside Job is an uncomfortable watch, and not because of the heady figures and baffling statistics. Its assessment is so total, and so bleak, that it may be informative, but it certainly isn’t empowering. A last gasp stab at inspiration, accompanied by aspirational crescendo and standing ovation rhetoric, is undercut by what came before.

In the age of gonzo sincerity and feel-good activism, this is a rather conflicted affair. Blessed with supreme polish, Inside Job isn’t a rallying cry to move its viewers to action, but it is nevertheless an important film, a consummate, engrossing look inside the glass skyscrapers that tower over the modern world.

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Michael Leader

• Sony Pictures Classics

Summary Inside Job is the first film to expose the shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. The global financial meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing their homes and jobs. Through extensive research and interviews with major financial insiders, politicians and journalists, Inside Job traces th ... Read More

• Documentary

Directed By : Charles Ferguson

Written By : Charles Ferguson, Chad Beck, Adam Bolt

Where to Watch

Self - Narrator

Gylfi zoega, self - professor of economics, university of iceland, andri snær magnason, self - writer & filmmaker, sigridur benediktsdottir, self - special investigative committee, icelandic parliament, paul volcker, self - former federal reserve chairman, dominique strauss-kahn, self - managing director, international monetary fund, george soros, self - chairman, soros fund management, barney frank, self - chairman, financial services committee, david mccormick, self - under secretary of the treasury, bush administration, scott talbott, self - chief lobbyist, financial services roundtable, andrew sheng, self - chief adviser, china banking regulatory commission, lee hsien loong, self - prime minister, singapore, christine lagarde, self - finance minister, france, gillian tett, self - u.s. managing editor, the financial times, nouriel roubini, self - professor, nyu business school, r. glenn hubbard, self - chief economic adviser, bush administration, eliot spitzer, self - former governor, new york, samuel hayes, self - professor emeritus of investment banking, harvard business school, charles morris, self - author, the two trillion dollar meltdown, robert gnaizda, self - former director, greenlining institute, critic reviews.

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Movie review: ‘Inside Job’

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What hit us?

How did things go so horribly wrong?

You have questions, “Inside Job” has answers. After watching Charles Ferguson’s powerhouse documentary about the global economic crisis, you will more than understand what went down — you will be thunderstruck and boiling with rage.

For this smart and confident film, thick with useful information conveyed with cinematic verve, lays out in comprehensive but always understandable detail the argument that the meltdown of 2008 was no unfortunate accident. Rather, the film posits, it was the result of an out-of-control finance industry that took unethical advantage of decades of deregulation. It’s enough to make you want to keep your money in a mattress.

Ferguson, who wrote and directed the excellent Oscar-nominated “No End in Sight,” about the U.S. occupation of Iraq, is ideally positioned to deliver the kind of thorough-going, persuasive analysis that “Inside Job” provides.

Neither a film school graduate nor an ideologue, Ferguson is rather a well-connected academic who has a doctorate in political science from MIT, was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and has been a consultant for high-tech firms such as Apple, Intel and Xerox.

Those connections and that background give the film assets many documentaries lack. For one thing, it has given Ferguson access to the kind of authoritative insiders who usually don’t appear on camera, including International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, French Minister of Finance Christine Lagarde and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

Ferguson’s credentials, and his sense of outrage, give him the intelligence to ask the tough questions and the willingness to do so. More than one of “Inside Job’s” talking heads look seriously disconcerted when the filmmaker says things like “You can’t be serious” and “Forgive me, that’s clearly not true.” Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia University business school, is so flustered he snaps, “You have three more minutes. Give it your best shot.”

The director may come from academia, but that doesn’t mean he has a weakness for jargon. The language and the thinking are crystal clear (editors Chad Beck and Adam Bolt co-wrote with Ferguson), the quotes are pungent, the vivid graphics by Bigstar clarify the points and Matt Damon pulls it all together with his narration.

“Inside Job” starts not on Wall Street but in Iceland, a nation whose problems turn out to be the world’s in microcosm. How did this small country, with a gross national product of $13 billion, end up with bank losses of $100 billion? The privatization of the three largest banks led to a borrowing spree that led to disaster.

In the United States, Ferguson explains, after more than 30 years without a financial crisis, things began to change in 1981. A group including Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (who was ideologically opposed to regulation) and both Republican and Democratic Treasury secretaries including Donald T. Regan, Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence H. Summers made deregulation the way things were going to be.

When complex, potentially dangerous financial instruments called derivatives came into vogue, unsung heroes, like government official Brooksley Born, pushed strenuously for their regulation, but the powers that be were so opposed that in 2000 Congress passed a bill specifically prohibiting that from happening.

Derivatives made it possible for banks that made housing loans to minimize their risk if there was a failure to repay, which helped fuel the boom in subprime mortgages. Then financial institutions combined these risky loans and made them seem as reliable as government securities, which of course they were not. Using the notorious credit default swaps, these firms were able to both sell those unreliable securities to gullible clients and also bet that they were going to fail. It was, as Laurel and Hardy might have said, a finemess.

“Inside Job” conveys more information than it is possible to succinctly recap, but it is always both easy to follow and alarming in its portrait of a system run frighteningly amok.

Given the financial industry’s fierce opposition to reform and the fact that, as “Inside Job” demonstrates, the deregulation ideology has found a comfortable home in academia, Ferguson is not exactly optimistic about our being able to avoid these kinds of catastrophes in the future. Which is why he made this film.

“It is my hope,” he writes in a director’s statement, “that after seeing this film we can all agree on the importance of restoring honesty and stability to our financial system, and of holding accountable those who destroyed it.” It’s a statement that, like this exceptional film, is hard to argue with.

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'Inside Job' – Film Review

by Ben Curtis

I watched Charles Ferguson’s excellent documentary “Inside Job” for the second time yesterday. It’s a masterful polemic exploring the series of bad decisions, deregulation and ideological economics that led to the financial crisis. Covering the rise of derivatives, moral hazard, revolving doors, questionable ratings, dodgy academic conflicts of interest, subprime mortgages, the severity of the crash, and bonuses, it’s all there, and explained in laymans terms by some of the worlds foremost experts and those who were right at the heart of it. From Nouriel Roubini, the now famous economist credited with predicting the crisis with startling accuracy, to the madame who catered to the vices of Wall Street’s top bankers.

Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Bob Rubin, Hank Paulson, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke failed to appear in the film, all of them declining to be interviewed, perhaps a wise decision on their parts in retrospect, after seeing the grilling Ferguson gave Glenn Hubbard, the Columbia University Dean, regarding the numerous conflicts of interest in being paid large sums of money for writing and supporting regulation (or abolishment of) that contributed to the crisis.

Part I of the film, “How we got here”, covers the deregulation of financial markets, for example how the Glass Steagall act was violated during the Citigroup merger, with the newly formed company given a year’s reprieve from the legislation while it was conveniently changed to accomodate the merger under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. George Soros uses a very good metaphor to explain the logic behind regulation and the ringfencing of funds. Soros describes the financial system as being like an oil tanker, with the money representing the oil in different compartments being separated into separate tanks through regulation. When deregulation happened the walls between the tanks are removed, and the oil begins to slosh around across the ship, destabilising it. In the instance of the financial markets this led to bubbles occurring in the dot-com era and recently in subprime mortgages. Of course, the nature of the financial system, that an endless supply of money can be focused into bubbles, without any real savings or money representing real value to back it up, is enormously problematic, and is not covered here.

Part II goes into the nature of the subprime bubble. Covering the AAA rating given to collections of mortgages held in Collateralised Debt Obligations which in many cases the borrowers entered into with less than 1% ownership of the home. AAA ratings are normally given to save investments like government bonds, and the remuneration of the ratings agencies was often higher when a higher rating was given, a clear case of moral hazard. The rise of securitisation meant that for all intents and purposes limits on the level of money that could be created by banks were meaningless. Money was created to issue a loan, and then the loan was often sold on to another financial institution or a wealthy investor who were often leveraged with created money themselves, freeing up capital for the issuing banks to make even more loans. This is how eventually people with no income, no jobs, and no assets were allowed to borrow 99% of the value of their homes, at massively inflated prices. Securitisation is but a symptom of the wider problem, a clever way that was devised to bypass regulation to limit the amount of money that can be created by banks. Securitisation is not the problem, it is the process that it was used to compound at fault.

Part III covers the crisis and the irresponsible actions of those pulling the strings at the time. Ben Bernanke and the US regulators failed to inform the French and British governments that Lehman Brothers was about to become bankrupt as the wave of defaults started to come through. The film accuses the investment banks of deliberate actions to cause the crash, with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs betting against CDO’s that internal memo’s referred to as “shitty deals”, and justifying it in the context of “market making”. The CEO of Countrywise, the biggest subprime mortgage lender in the USA managed to walk away with nearly half a billion dollars in the year preceding its downfall. The FBI referred to an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud with dodgy loan documentation, now biting the banks back as many homeowners fight their evictions with this evidence.

Part IV and V cover “accountability”, and “where we are now”, detailing the extent of the damage and the fact that no criminal prosecutions have been made, none of the extensive remuneration in the boom years has been recovered, and the academic are all still working in the same jobs, while the financial institutions continue to consolidate and the bonuses continue to get bigger and bigger, with no new regulation coming into force as of yet, and no real change from the industry beginning to appear. Harvard and Columbia professors are given highly accusatory interviews for their involvement in being paid large sums of money to oversee and recommend deregulation in the USA and vouch for the stability of Iceland’s astronomically leveraged banking sector.

I would highly reccomend this film to anybody interested in the subject. While it does not cover the real, deep systemic causes of the crisis, the fact that our monetary system is based on credit or debt, and that without constantly continuing issuance of debt, the whole thing falls apart, it is certainly a very useful narrative for the financial crisis, and the knock on effects that deregulation, mega-bonuses, moral hazard, and the failure of the duty of care had on the public and the global economy.

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Inside Job’ On Netflix, A Funny Animated Series About A Corporation That’s Actually The “Deep State”

Where to stream:.

• Lizzy Caplan

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Face it: We all have friends or family members that think the rest of us “sheeple” are blind to the manipulations of the “deep state.” What if that deep state really existed, but as a private corporation? That’s the idea behind the new animated series  Inside Job.

INSIDE JOB : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A shot of the White House. A guy is drinking outside of the fence. When a tour group of kids comes by and the guide says, “The government works for you!”, the man says, “Bullshit!’

The Gist: The man starts to rant and rave to the kids about lizard people and the deep state, until his daughter comes and embarrassingly tells him to get in her car. She is Reagan Ridley (Lizzy Caplan), one of the lead engineers at Cognito, Inc., a company that her father Rand (Christian Slater) used to run until, well, he went nuts.

As we see when the two of them walk through the building, Cognito, Inc. isn’t your average corporation. It’s actually the “deep state” everyone talks about, with aliens, the aforementioned lizard people, and all sorts of stuff going on that mirrors what your crazy uncle used to talk about at Thanksgiving. Reagan is up for a lead engineering position, but the current CEO, J.R. Scheimpough (Andy Daly), thinks that Reagan is lacking the people skills to do the job.

J.R. pairs her up with a blank-faced recent college graduate named Brett Hand (Clark Duke). He’s a former frat boy who ingratiated himself to J.R. on the golf course; as much of a glad-handler as he is, though, Brett knows that he’s in over his head. They lead a pretty eclectic team: Dr. Andre (Bobby Lee), who likes to experiment with all sorts of substances; Glenn Dolphman (John DiMaggio), a human-dolphin hybrid; Gigi Thompson (Tisha Campbell), a PR expert and the Head of Media Manipulation; and Magic Myc (Brett Gelman) who, along with being the office jerk, is a plant-like being that can read minds.

Reagan hates being paired with Brett, but she’s too busy getting her robot president project — ROBOTUS — off the ground. The idea is to kidnap the current less-than-bright president (who looks suspiciously like Mitt Romney) and sub in a controllable robot. But when J.R. suspends Reagan for mental health reasons, Rand adds some code to the robot president that would make him become sentient when flashbulbs went off, making him spew all sorts of patriotic claptrap.

When ROBOTUS goes rogue, it’s up to Reagan and Brett to stop him. After the defeat him (and disarm the nuclear football), Reagan figures out that she needs “a mediocre white man to be a human shield and a social lubricant.”

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? American Dad ,  but much more paranoid in tone. Or maybe  Futurama , but rooted in the present day.

Our Take: Inside Job  executive producer Shion Takeuchi is used to working on shows ( Gravity Falls , Regular Show ) and films ( Inside Out ) that take  bit of an askew world view, so a cartoon about an shadow government that runs the “deep state” seems to be something that’s in her wheelhouse. But what she and the rest of the show’s writers get right is that they still base the show in character-driven humor, but with enough gags to make sharp-eyed viewers laugh their butts off.

Takeuchi and company are able to balance the fact that “Cognito, Inc.” (which is a anagramish way to say “Incognito”… get it?) runs just like any other dopey corporation and that your coworkers are likely both your closest confidants and biggest impediments to success with, well, the whole deep state thing. It’s an idea that has legs because the main characters are established well right off the bat. Reagan has a personality problem, as we see when she uses an attack robot to get her team to file their time sheets. Brett is so blank-faced that even the way he’s animated is featureless. But, when they work together, we see more to each of their characters than we usually see in the first episode of any comedy.

It helps when the cast is chock full of big names that are also fine voice actors. We’re especially tickled at hearing Slater as the paranoid and off-kilter Rand, who will constantly be there to be his daughter’s biggest supporter and biggest thorn in her side. But Caplan, Campbell, Duke, Gelman, DiMaggio, Daly and Lee all do their job to embody their characters well and not just be celebrity voices.

We mentioned  Futurama above, and that feels like the direction the show is going in, where it becomes a workplace comedy that happens to take place in a very unusual workplace. If that’s where it’s going (and the episode descriptions seem to indicate that’s where it’s headed), then this should be a satisfying show filled with characters who grow, change, and — in some funny cases — stubbornly stay exactly the same as always.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: As the team leaves J.R.’s office to get margaritas, Brett bemoans the fact that Reagan has to incinerate ROBOTUS. Then, many floors below, we see a damaged ROBOTUS in a glass cell, watching Reagan on a monitor.

Sleeper Star: Pretty much anything Brett Gelman does is hilarious, and he’s got some of the best lines as the jerky but mysterious Myc.

Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Because  Inside Job immediately establishes its characters, its brand of humor goes way beyond just seeing lizard people struggle with the Keurig machine in the break room. And that’s what will make the series last a few seasons.

Will you stream or skip the animated series #InsiderJob on @netflix ? #SIOSI — Decider (@decider) October 23, 2021

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream  Inside Job On Netflix

• Stream It Or Skip It

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Common sense media reviewers.

Conspiracies are real in edgy animated adult comedy.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this TV show.

The show revolves around the concept that the Deep

Reagan Ridley is brilliant, terse, and wants to ta

The lead character is a woman and a tech genius. T

Gory, bloody fantasy violence that leads to injury

Jokes about sex and sexuality.

Religious exclamations ("oh my God"), words like "

References to pop icons like Oprah and Pitbull, an

Drinking is visible. References to taking prescrip

Parents need to know that Inside Job is an animated comedy about a young genius working for the "Deep State." There's a lot of cursing, including "s--t" and "f--k," some sex jokes, and lots of fantasy violence that is more silly than frightening. Drinking and drug use are also visible. Recognizable pop culture…

Positive Messages

The show revolves around the concept that the Deep State is real, and that the government is comprised of aliens, lizard people, robotics, and other strange things. The ethics of what Cognito, Inc. does is occasionally raised, but quickly dismissed.

Positive Role Models

Reagan Ridley is brilliant, terse, and wants to take over the world with robots and other technology. Brett is clueless but means well.

Diverse Representations

The lead character is a woman and a tech genius. The ensemble cast is both male and female; one woman is Black. Occasionally side characters are from various racial/ethnic communities.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Gory, bloody fantasy violence that leads to injury and death is sometimes shown. Guns and other weapons shown. Someone thinks about poisoning a co-worker.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Religious exclamations ("oh my God"), words like "a--hole," "hell," "bitch," "dick," and strong curses like "s--t" and "f--k" are frequently uttered. Rude gestures are also shown.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

References to pop icons like Oprah and Pitbull, and movies like Face/Off .

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Drinking is visible. References to taking prescription drugs like Ambien are referenced. People are shown inhaling chemicals.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Inside Job is an animated comedy about a young genius working for the "Deep State." There's a lot of cursing , including "s--t" and "f--k," some sex jokes, and lots of fantasy violence that is more silly than frightening. Drinking and drug use are also visible. Recognizable pop culture references to people like Oprah and movies like Face/Off are featured throughout each episode.

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (4)
• Kids say (31)

Based on 4 parent reviews

What's the Story?

INSIDE JOB is an adult animated comedy about a young and power-hungry tech genius working for the "Deep State." Reagan Ridley ( Lizzy Caplan ) works at Cognito, Inc., a company overseen by dark overlords that is responsible for some of the world's biggest conspiracies. Attempting to follow the steps of her father Randy (played by Christian Slater ), a former Cognito head, she's been pushing her co-workers, including selfie-taking Gigi ( Tisha Campbell ), Glenn, a man-dolphin hybrid ( John DiMaggio ), the drug abusing Dr. Andrew (Bobby Lee), and Magic Myc ( Brett Gelman ) a giant and colorful mind-reading mushroom, to the brink. When her boss J.R. ( Andrew Daly ) decides to promote her alongside the affable Brett ( Clark Duke ), an inexperienced former Yale frat boy, she resents having to work with him. But Reagan is still committed to proving that she's the most brilliant one there, and that she can still manage to keep the global subterfuges going.

Is It Any Good?

This irreverent series pokes fun at some of the many myths surrounding American democracy and the "Deep State." The slightly megalomaniacal Reagan Ridley is engaging, her father colorful, and Brett obnoxious, but amusing. But the rest of the ensemble cast is less developed, which feels like a missed opportunity. Meanwhile, the running gags are plenty, but they lack nuance, and the show is so fast-paced that some of the punchlines never quite land. Nonetheless, viewers who like this sort of entertainment will find Inside Job worth checking out.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the idea of the "Deep State." What are some of the conspiracies associated with it? Why do you think people believe in it?

Would the overall plot of Inside Job significantly change if Brett was characterized as the difficult, power-hungry person, and Reagan the friendly sidekick? If so, why?

• Premiere date : December 22, 2021
• Cast : Lizzy Caplan , Christian Slater , Clark Duke
• Network : Netflix
• Genre : Comedy
• TV rating : TV-MA
• Last updated : July 18, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Netflix’s ‘inside job’: tv review.

The new adult animated series features Lizzy Caplan voicing a thirtysomething woman angling to take charge of a company orchestrating vast global conspiracies on behalf of a group of shadowy overlords.

By Daniel Fienberg

Daniel Fienberg

Chief Television Critic

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Maybe it’s just the amount of time I spend watching TV news or extended HBO documentaries — three docs built around footage from the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection and we haven’t even hit the one-year anniversary — but I’ve reached the point where even a casual mention of the “Deep State” causes me to wince. It’s the sort of generally meaningless conspiracy theorizing that might have gotten you laughed out of a serious room five years ago, but has now been used as a justification for real-world violence and social unrest.

In Netflix ‘s new animated comedy Inside Job , the Deep State is played for laughs, with fitful results. I can see a certain power in reclaiming the ridiculousness of the Deep State, of taking it out of the realm of legitimate conversation and putting it back into context with mole-men, moth-men and gigantic sentient fungi. Of course, isn’t that exactly what a real Deep State would probably want to do if it actually existed?

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Airdate: Friday, Oct. 22 (Netflix) Cast: Lizzy Caplan, Christian Slater, Clark Duke, Andrew Daly, Bobby Lee, John DiMaggio, Tisha Campbell, Brett Gelman Creator: Shion Takeuchi

Created by Shion Takeuchi and executive produced by Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch, Inside Job has a lot of energy — too much energy, I often felt — and a near-infinite number of potential storylines to mine. But through 10 episodes, it’s still struggling to define its supporting characters and its best episodes just happen to be the ones that stray furthest from the core premise. Or at least those episodes are the ones that made me wince less?

Our heroine is Reagan Ridley ( Lizzy Caplan ), a tech genius working at Cognito Inc., the public-facing company secretly orchestrating many of the world’s darkest conspiracies on behalf of a group of shadowy overlords. The daughter of former Cognito bigwig Rand ( Christian Slater ), Reagan is brilliant, profane — the show is surely not for the kiddies — socially awkward and bent on world domination. But when it comes time for her to get a big promotion, she has to share the job with Brett ( Clark Duke ), a completely unqualified yes-man.

A poster boy for white male privilege, Brett is actually fairly well-meaning, which immediately causes Reagan’s co-workers — gossipy Gigi (Tisha Campbell), man-dolphin hybrid Glenn (John DiMaggio), jerky mushroom Myc (Brett Gelman) and drug-addled Dr. Andre (Bobby Lee) — to prefer him.

Voiced with trademark tartness by Caplan, Reagan is an unapologetically prickly centerpiece for the show, though it’s bizarre how frequently the series takes the things that could be interesting or unique about the character and reduces them to daddy issues tied to the one-note, grating Rand. I was particularly perplexed when a whole episode seemingly built to an Asperger’s diagnosis, a totally worthwhile thing to delve into in an adult cartoon, and then disappointed when it became a “Yeah, daddy issues again” shrug.

Maybe if Rand weren’t such a predictably dull, egomaniacal character I wouldn’t have minded seeing Reagan’s psychology tethered so completely and unimaginatively to him. You’re a show with Sasquatches, literal sheeple and celebrity clones and yet your creativity surrounding a difficult woman gets stuck in this rudimentary first gear?

Most of the supporting characters haven’t found that additional step from quirky to appealingly funny either. Andre, Gigi and Myc remain formulaically odd space-fillers with no real comic voices to speak of, especially annoying when you have vocal talent like Gelman, who couldn’t give a boring line-reading if he tried. Even if Glenn is basically just Futurama ‘s DiMaggio working in Bender-adjacent voice mode, the character is grotesque enough to get laughs, especially in one above-average episode in which he and Brett engage in Face/Off -related hijinks.

And yes, the episode references Face/Off in very specific terms, just as almost everything in Inside Job feels like it’s a direct reference to a movie, a TV show, a family conspiracy theory or to Netflix itself. It’s so hung-up on Easter eggs and in-jokes and screen-filling, pause-requiring visual gags that the show becomes exhausting at times, especially in the early episodes.

As Inside Job goes along and thankfully lets the team escape the bowels of Cognito, there are better stories in which the conspiracy-of-the-week is either an afterthought or simply an instigation for adventures that don’t mention the Deep State at all. It’s ironic that the season’s best episode focuses on a mission to a town trapped by an ’80s nostalgia chemical agent, a half-hour dedicated to countless nostalgic references and countless criticisms about how mind-numbing nostalgia is. But hey, funny is funny.

Inside Job continues an odd trend among Netflix animated comedies of starting with characters and situations in the most abrasive place possible and then attempting to evolve to someplace more affectionate and grounded by midseason. It was a tactic that didn’t work at all on Hoops and never found consistency Chicago Party Aunt ; I’m not going to try explaining for the fiftieth time why F is for Family remains the difficult-to-achieve model for this sort of Netflix series.

Of course, there are general questions about what the Netflix animation department has learned from any of its successes or failures. This can be illustrated no more plainly than nobody considering whether or not having Caplan voice a character who is textually biracial was a good idea after the final season of BoJack Horseman discussed such things in very frank terms.

After a full season here, Brett is the only character in the ensemble who really has a fully believable arc and Reagan the only character whose lack of immediate likability is an asset and not a flaw. I found occasional things to laugh at and found affection for some of the storylines late in the season. I never fully signed on and never fully stopped wincing at “Deep State” references, but there are elements to be amused by if you don’t have the same visceral reaction to the pilot.

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Inside No 9 review – nothing short of miraculous

Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton have been making these ingenious, heartstopping chillers for a decade now – and the final series kicks off with perhaps the most meaningful episode yet

E very episode of Inside No 9 is dramatically different – and every episode is also essentially the same. Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton tend to begin each instalment of their magnificent comedy-horror anthology by summoning a scene of distinctively British mundanity: it’s small, it’s boring, it’s awkward, it’s wryly funny – the workaday greyness sparkles with fragments of laugh-out-loud hilarity. Yet from the start, that tableau of normality bristles with nauseating dread – ultimately, the show will excavate from it a blast or two of terror. We know it’s coming, but we don’t know how and we don’t know when. At this point, Shearsmith and Pemberton have used the formula almost 50 times. That it still produces such grimly fascinating, heart-stoppingly tense and peerlessly clever half-hours of TV is nothing short of miraculous.

Perhaps not wanting to push their luck, Shearsmith and Pemberton are finally nudging the door closed on No 9, as (fittingly) this ninth series airs. It’s a “pause” in production, Pemberton has said, rather than a decisive finale. That noncommittal approach will probably quash hopes for a twist to end all twists: Inside No 9 is notorious for its incredible endings – the sort of shock reveals that make the ground below your feet shift. It would have been fascinating to see how it pulled off its ultimate denouement.

But for now, at least, we have the opening episode of a new series to be getting on with. Once again, a typically humdrum scene is established on a sparsely populated Merseyrail train running underground, but you’d pinch yourself if you really did find yourself sitting in this carriage. It’s like being in a mashup of recent TV hits, with a roll-call of star names to die for: Siobhan Finneran (Happy Valley), Charlie Cooper (This Country), Philippa Dunne (Motherland), Joel Fry (Plebs), Mark Bonnar (Guilt, Catastrophe), Susan Wokoma (Year of the Rabbit) and a practically unrecognisable Matthew Kelly.

Inside No 9 is clearly a dream gig for any actor (later episodes feature Eddie Marsan, Natalie Dormer and Adrian Scarborough). But despite their starry accomplices, Shearsmith and Pemberton remain the beating heart of the show. For all their narrative genius, Inside No 9 would never have worked without the duo’s ability to load their characters with depth and backstory in a matter of seconds. Here, a mustachioed and tweed-jacketed Shearsmith is a man who has retired into a world of meek comfort – his wife (Finneran) squirms against her husband’s late-life conformity – while Pemberton plays a viperish and proudly un-woke drag queen. Before long, Cooper’s homeless man stumbles through the carriage asking for money. The train screeches to a halt. The lights fail. Suddenly, a nurse (Dunne) reports her purse missing. Bonnar – a teacher, seething with barely repressed fury – decides to search everyone to find the culprit. But Fry’s jumpy conspiracy theorist refuses to let him check his bag.

Unlike other episodes, which are often littered with handbrake turns, this time we end up sitting tight for the big reveal. And it’s completely unguessable – that violent shift in perspective executed with aplomb. Unfortunately, though (and it pains me to say this considering how absorbing the rest of the episode is) the actual twist falls a bit flat. While the most successful endings tie together clues secreted throughout, this one seems to come out of nowhere and is far-fetched enough to leave you with more questions than answers. Although this is probably one of Inside No 9’s most meaningful episodes – there’s a thought-provoking political point nestled in there – a reveal is always most skin-crawlingly effective when it feels plausible on a literal level as well as a symbolic one.

However, Shearsmith and Pemberton have five more opportunities to get it bang on, as they have so many times before (future instalments involve an escape room, an Edwardian piano-tuner and strange new neighbours). And an episode of Inside No 9 that leaves you slightly nonplussed is still a hundred times more inventive and affecting than 99% of what is pumped through our screens. Most series drag out their one big twist over 10 hours; this show lavishes us with ingenuity.

Shearsmith and Pemberton have announced a West End show based on the series. Theatre will doubtless add an extra dimension to their hair-raising tales, but it’s TV – with its haunting intimacy – that feels like their natural home. Hopefully, two of the greatest minds to grace our screens won’t be able to stay away for long.

Inside No 9 aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now.

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