When a TV show aims to speak to a political moment, it helps for it to face our reality head-on. Zero Day tries for the former but fails at the latter, making for an extremely frustrating political thriller.
The limited series marks Robert De Niro's first leading role on TV. He also executive produces. Zero Day also boasts other big names like Angela Bassett, Lizzy Caplan, and Jesse Plemons, as well as creators Eric Newman (The Watcher, Narcos) and Noah Oppenheim (Jackie, NBC News). While this crew lends gravitas to Zero Day, the show can't escape the feeling that it's out of sync with the political climate it's trying to critique.
What's Zero Day about?
Zero Day drops us into a United States in crisis. A nationwide cyberattack has caused a minute-long power outage that compromised transportation and communications systems, as well as the power grid. Thousands are dead, and the entire country is on edge, especially since the attack ended with an ominous message to every U.S. citizen: "This will happen again." Now, sitting President Evelyn Mitchell (Bassett, woefully underused) is on the hunt to find out who caused the attack and how to prevent it.
Enter former President George Mullen (De Niro). A popular president who won bipartisan support, Mullen would have been a shoo-in for a second term had he not resigned to grieve the death of his son. As Mitchell sees it, Mullen's popularity makes him the ideal candidate to run the Zero Day commission, which will have great powers of surveillance and search and seizure. The commission could be an affront to civil liberties, which is partly why Mullen takes the job — to stop someone more likely to abuse it from getting there first.
Now racing against time, it's up to Mullen to root out the source of the attack. While many believe the culprit to be Russia, Mullen has reason to suspect the attack came from closer to home. He'll have to wade through misinformation, conspiracy theories, and power-hungry tech moguls and hedge fund managers in order to find the truth. As if that weren't enough, he'll face opposition from his own daughter, Congresswoman Alexandra Mullen (Caplan), as well as claims that he isn't sound enough of mind to do this job. (Surreal sequences featuring the repeated use of the Sex Pistols' "Who Killed Bambi?" certainly seem to support that claim.)
All these element make for a compelling enough thriller, especially some late-season twists. But for a show that deals with American division, misinformation, and conspiracy theories, Zero Day doesn't interrogate the reasons why these problems are so prevalent now, or why they're so intrinsically linked to the government.
Zero Day is frustratingly vague about American politics.
Despite its platitudes about bipartisanship and "reaching across the aisle," Zero Day doesn't actually assign its characters political parties. Where does Mullen fall on the political spectrum? How about President Mitchell, or Speaker of the House Richard Dreyer (Matthew Modine)? We sense opposition and tension between them, and while we can make some educated guesses as to their affiliation, Zero Day never lets us know for sure.
The choice is intentional. Plemons, who plays Mullen's aide Roger Carlson, told The Times, "When you do get into the specifics of a political party, it gives you an out immediately as a viewer to either say, 'I'm for this person' or 'I'm against them.' Something disengages as you're watching."
Yet knowing party affiliations — as we do in other highly political shows like The West Wing and House of Cards — gives you vital context about where a character may stand on certain issues, and who their base is. In a show whose crux winds up being "How can we fix a divided America?", knowing which side of the ideological divide people are on is crucial. Without this knowledge, politician characters like President Mitchell and Dreyer feel woefully undercooked, especially when they deliver sermons about the problems facing the country.
"Half the country [is] caught up in a fever dream of lies and conspiracy," one character tells Mullen. "The other half [is] shouting about pronouns and ranking their grievances."
Statements like these wildly simplify the complex issues facing the United States today, not to mention put people just wanting to be referred to by the right pronouns on the same level as dangerous conspiracy theorists. (Zero Day was filmed prior to the 2024 election, but given the Trump administration's ongoing erasure of queer and trans history, the catchall complaint about "pronouns" is extra unfortunate.)
Crucially, Zero Day never examines who might have led people to believe these lies or have these grievances. The answer is undoubtedly the very politicians we're following, as well as figures like tech billionaire Monica Kidder (Gaby Hoffmann), who barely gets enough screen time to register as the show's answer to Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. However, since we don't know who stands where and how they treat their base, Zero Day removes culpability for this divide from politicians — they're just trying to fix the division, apparently — and places it on the American people. After all, the only time Zero Day gives an explicit political affiliation is to call out a homegrown terrorist network of "radical leftists." But even then there are inconsistencies. Why do these leftists follow controversial TV host Evan Green (Dan Stevens), who's positioned as a right-leaning, Alex Jones-like figure? Details like this immediately remove viewers from the world of the show, even though Zero Day keeps stressing that it's speaking to division in modern society.
But in the Trump era, when political figures thrive on just such division, Zero Day's vagaries don't just feel naive. They feel like cop-outs.
