One can only feel pity for the makers of political thrillers filmed prior to the second inauguration of Donald J. Trump, or, depending on how you look at it, the first inauguration of Elon Musk. On a daily basis, the reality emanating from the general vicinity of the White House laps any fictional attempt at inventing such a threat to the republic. For example, Paradise, Dan Fogelman’s hit Hulu series about a post-apocalyptic presidential assassination, is based on the idea of a rogue megabillionaire taking over the federal government, but it rather quaintly portrays her as doing this from the shadows, instead of from a social media account with the username “Harry Bōlz.” The filmmakers of the world simply can’t keep up.
This is true even of Zero Day, despite its impressive imprimatur. Co-creator Michael S. Schmidt is a Pulitzer Prize–winning political reporter for the New York Times, while co-creator and co-writer Noah Oppenheim is a former president of NBC News. (Whatever you do, do not look into their careers any further than that.) Co-creator and co-writer Eric Newman is best known for his work on one of Netflix’s core franchises, the true-crime saga Narcos and Narcos: Mexico, as well as last year’s Sofía Vergara vehicle Griselda, which was a Narcos season in all but name.
30:18 REMAINING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW THAT THE COUNTRY IS GOING TO BE OKAY CAPTIONED PLEASE
But the plot of Zero Day reads like a laundry list of phenomena the real world has rendered totally moot. Transportation crashes due to the rapid shutdown of vital infrastructure? Our government is doing that itself, right out in the open. A president suffering from obvious cognitive decline? The most recent guy had that, and he lost to another guy who also has that. (Reagan had it forty years ago.) Rogue, Russian-aligned actors seizing control of the nation’s digital nerve system? I hope Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegstreth get to the bottom of this when they’re not exchanging greeting cards with Vladimir Putin. A massive, unconstitutional civil-liberties power grab that could see people being disappeared off the streets without a warrant? That’s just your tax dollars and our pals at ICE at work. Lizzy Caplan wondering if neo-Nazis had somehow learned to use computers? I give you DOGE. Lunatics shrieking at the government about conspiracies and crisis actors? The day I’m writing this, the Senate voted to confirm, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, a man who has claimed covid was bioengineered to spare Jews. And so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and on and on and on, and, and, you get it, we all get it, it’s great.
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Zero Day’s strength, then, is not going to be found in the writing. This would probably be true even under a Harris/Walz administration, as it’s the kind of show that believes huge crowds of New Yorkers driven half-insane with grief and fear can be quieted with a rousing speech about working together, with swelling Jeff Russo music underneath. No, the strength is the cast, which is frankly ridiculous.
Seriously, get a load of this: Robert De Niro as the former president. Joan Allen as his federal appeals court judge wife. Lizzy Caplan as their progressive congresswoman daughter. Jesse Plemons as his government handler. Bill Camp as his buddy in the CIA. President Angela Bassett. Connie Britton and Dan Stevens are also in this thing and they haven’t even shown up yet. Sicko mode casting!
The story’s a simple one. George Mullen (De Niro) is a widely beloved former president whose decision not to seek reelection after the death of his son has done much to burnish his reputation as a man above the fray. One morning, as he goes about his daily routine with his loyal dog and his loyal assistant Hector (George Cantor), a massive cyberattack shuts down the transportation grid and most methods of communication for a full minute. The attack causes massive casualties, including the ghost writer (Hannah Gross) dispatched by Mullen’s publisher that morning to ensure his memoir is coming along. No one claims responsibility or makes any demands. The only message from the responsible party is sent directly to every phone in the country: “THIS WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.”
In the uproar that follows, President Evelyn Mitchell (Bassett), moving to outflank her right-wing rival, Speaker of the House Richard Dreyer (Matthew Modine), forms a commission granted essentially dictatorial powers to find and punish whoever did this. She taps Mullen for the job. His daughter, Alex (Caplan), thinks he’s being set up to be a political fall guy, and that the commission is morally repugnant at any rate. HIs wife, Sheila (Allen) says this is precisely why he should take the job — you can’t trust that kind of power in anyone else’s hands. As Alex points out, this is of course the justification basically every dictator uses.nNaturally Mullen takes the job — there wouldn’t be a show if he didn’t — and opens up a new Moleskine notebook to create one of his trademark journals, through which he’s recorded and organized his entire career.
But it’s strange: We in the audience don’t get nearly the same amount of information he does. When CIA Director Lasch (Camp) pulls him into a secure room to tell him what they’ve secretly uncovered about the attack, both the windows and the noise go white. When Natan (Mark Ivanir) Mullen’s secret Mossad contact (there’s another detail that has not aged well), tells him what he’s learned, we don’t hear that either. Mullen also repeatedly experiences auditory hallucinations, some striking and some less so, but these could be attributable to stress, or the lingering trauma of his son’s death.
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It’s not until the night after he accepts the job and addresses the nation that the depth of Mullen’s plight is made clear. Preparing to take off for his first day on the job, he receives a call from Natan confirming that everything he’d said was true. (By now we know the attack is linked to freelance NYC-based hackers working with the Russian consulate, but the implication is that it goes much deeper.) So Mullen returns to his study briefly to retrieve the notebook chronicling his conversation with Natan for further study.
But when he fails to remember the combination to the safe, he panics. He refuses to respond to any of the Secret Service agents calling to him. He smashes a photo of him and his old Army buddies in Vietnam, recalling that the date written on the back is also the code to the safe. And when he opens the book, he finds he just repeatedly wrote the title of the abortive Sex Pistols/Russ Meyer film project Who Killed Bambi? for some reason. (Tenpole Tudor’s title track for the film plays over the closing credits and features in the most prominent of Mullen’s auditory hallucinations.) When he angrily approaches Hector, demanding to know how someone “replaced” his notebook, he discovers Hector isn’t there at all — the man retired five years ago.
In short, the fate of the American experiment has been placed in the hands of someone in the grips of senile dementia. Imagine that!
The best thing this premiere has going for it is the bait-and-switch involving the safe. The episode’s cold open, which ends with a “three days earlier” tag to set up the rest of the hour, implies that Mullen is under attack, and is desperately trying to secure the notebook from enemy forces. In fact, he’s just a confused old man, ignoring people calling his name because he forgot the combination the safe where he keeps a diary full of ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY gibberish. It’s not just a clever trick, it’s a canny inversion of De Niro’s actorly reputation as a man of action and command.
But it’s hard not to look at that cast and think what might have been. Twenty years ago, David Chase could have written De Niro the role of a lifetime on The Sopranos, and I say that knowing De Niro has had half a dozen roles of a lifetime easily. But it was still rare then for stars of his magnitude to make the crossover from film to television; the days of Nicole Kidman heading the cast of multiple TV shows were still far away. Now, of course, Netflix has the budget to hire A-list actors, but for what? Zero Day may be corny, but it’s competently made, and I challenge you to try to look away from Plemons or Caplan when they’re on screen. Yet while I know it’s not even trying to be The Irishman, another Netflix/De Niro collab…well, it’s hard to forget what else this guy is capable of. My hope for the remaining five episodes is that his character’s condition gives De Niro the actor something to sink his teeth into while the republic still stands.
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Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.