Right from its opening scene, the Netflix political thriller Zero Day starts cheating the audience, presenting a skewed perspective on a relatively innocuous event from later in the first episode. Former U.S. President George Mullen (Robert De Niro) searches frantically around his home office for the combination to a hidden safe, while loud voices and flashing lights close in, and the locked door is about to be breached. The show then cuts back to three days earlier, but there isn't some grand mystery leading up to the reveal of who was closing in on Mullen in that initial scene.
Before the episode ends, the anticlimactic explanation of Mullen's actions provides a clear indication of the sloppy and infuriating narrative choices that will unfold over the six episodes of this shockingly inept limited series. It's almost hard to believe that two veteran journalists (NBC's Noah Oppenheim and The New York Times' Michael S. Schmidt) co-created Zero Day alongside longtime TV writer and producer Eric Newman, since nothing about the timid, equivocating series rings even remotely true.
A story about a massive terrorist attack on the United States and the subsequent high-level commission given extraordinary powers to find the culprits should not be this politically toothless. More than half the major characters are elected or appointed government officials, yet the creators have meticulously removed almost any references to real-world issues or entities that could be remotely controversial. Opposing political parties are referred to simply as "that side of the aisle," and even a notorious cable-news blowhard has views so muddled that they are essentially indiscernible.
That lack of conviction might be forgivable if Zero Day were an engaging, suspenseful thriller in the vein of a show like 24 or Homeland, which also feature jumbled politics but at least provide compelling characters in tense, high-stakes situations. Zero Day begins with a nationwide cyber attack that kills thousands of people, yet there's rarely any urgency to the storytelling, or any sense of the danger that the characters — not to mention the entire American population — could be in.
Mullen is living in peaceful retirement on his upstate New York compound, working slowly on his memoirs while his wife Sheila (Joan Allen) is about to be confirmed as a federal justice, and his daughter Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan) serves as a congressional representative from Generic Political Party A. Following the attack that takes out all electronic systems in the U.S. for one minute, President Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett) and Congress authorize the Zero Day Commission, which is unencumbered by due process or concerns about civil rights. Mullen, a one-term president who enjoys a generally positive reputation across both sides of that meaningless aisle, is recruited as a neutral figure to head the commission.
Mullen spends six episodes discovering lots of red herrings and dead ends, eventually revealing a conspiracy that is both underwhelming and unconvincing, and certainly isn't worth the time it takes to get there. Nearly everyone in the overqualified cast — which also includes Jesse Plemons and Connie Britton as Mullen's top aides, Dan Stevens as a polarizing TV personality, and Matthew Modine as the congressional leader of Generic Political Party B — plods their way through the dull, expository dialogue, playing people with no depth or inner life.
Two different secret affairs between central characters come as surprises not because of deft misdirection, but because the actors involved have no chemistry. On multiple occasions, Mullen enters into supposedly important conversations that are obscured from the audience for no purpose other than to withhold pieces of basic information. On a simple storytelling level, Zero Day is a colossal failure, wrapping up its plot with numerous loose ends that the creators apparently just gave up on.
Like the retired Mullen being reluctantly thrust back into the political spotlight, De Niro seems mildly perturbed to be appearing in his first regular TV role, and the other actors follow his lead. Nobody looks pleased to be involved in this humorless, self-satisfied waste of time, and viewers should take that hint and avoid the experience entirely.
Zero Day
Created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim and Michael Schmidt
Starring Robert De Niro, Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons
Streaming on Netflix
