Angela Bassett, Joan Allen, Connie Britton, Jesse Plemons, and Lizzy Caplan co-star in a series about politicians trying to find answers after a deadly cyberattack.
During a break in the second half of Netflix’s six-part political thriller Zero Day (and there are more breaks than there should be), I began to contemplate how much more efficiently the show’s central crisis could be resolved with the help of Owen Hendricks, the protagonist of Netflix’s The Recruit, or Peter Sutherland, the protagonist of Netflix’s The Night Agent.
Creators: Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, Michael Schmidt
Stars: Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, Lizzy Caplan
The last few Netflix political thrillers have largely become fungible due to the streaming platform’s compact release schedule. The Diplomat is the best of this bunch, so I’ll leave it out of the conversation. The Recruit is a silly show, but it dives into its absurdities with a reckless, fast-paced abandon that I appreciate. The Night Agent takes itself much more seriously, but creator Shawn Ryan has a tremendous in-house editing mechanism that keeps the show lean and dynamic.
The sad truth is that while Owen Hendricks and Peter Sutherland would probably significantly improve Zero Day, neither character would fit into the show's dreary world, which wastes an undeniably spectacular cast on a fundamentally silly and unrealistic story that desperately wants to be taken as serious and realistic. The truth is that the cast is too good to make Zero Day unwatchable, but its self-congratulatory conviction that it's way smarter than it actually is makes it hard to accept on anything beyond a speculative "What are all these people doing here?" level.
Robert De Niro plays George Mullen, independent former President of the United States. Mullen is famous for being the last president able to come to terms with the other party (it's unclear which of those two parties that is on a show that makes no reference to "Democrats" or "Republicans") and for deciding not to run for reelection under somewhat mysterious circumstances.
Mullen has a boring post-presidential routine: He wakes up, takes his Lipitor, goes for a swim, goes for a run, reads the President’s Daily Brief, and goes to his office and struggles to write his memoirs. His wife Sheila (Joan Allen), an aspiring judge, is around from time to time. His estranged daughter Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan), a congresswoman whose superficial resemblance to a real-life New York City politician with almost the same name is not in the least coincidental, is never around.
Then one afternoon, the power goes out. Everywhere. Planes crash. Security systems shut down. Anarchy breaks loose across the United States. For one minute. Everyone in the country gets an alert that says, “THIS WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.”
The cyberattack, dubbed “Day Zero,” kills thousands and frightens millions, prompting nonpartisan Chairwoman Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett) to work with the Speaker of the House (Richard Dreyer, played by Matthew Modine) to form a nonpartisan investigative commission to make sure THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN AGAIN.
The only person America would trust enough to lead the commission is Mullen, though he appears unable to distinguish between “malware” and “MalcWear,” a new clothing line Malcolm Gladwell has been developing for 9,999 hours. Mullen is given nearly unlimited power to conduct his investigation, throwing the Constitution out the window.
What Mitchell doesn’t know—what no one knows—is that Mullen seems to have some disagreements with reality, experiencing memory lapses and auditory hallucinations as if he’s constantly hearing “Who Killed Bambi?” of the Sex Pistols for reasons the series only half-explains.
Caught up in the ensuing chaos are Mullen’s longtime assistant/fixer/something Roger (Jesse Plemons), his former chief of staff Valerie (Connie Britton), the head of the CIA (Bill Camp), a Tucker Carlson-esque expert (Dan Stevens), a shady Jeffrey Epstein-esque billionaire (Clark Gregg), and more.
The cyberattack turns out to be — SPOILER! — a conspiracy, and I’m not going to tell you how deep the conspiracy goes. But let’s just say it’s not “the bottom line.”
Created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, and Michael Schmidt, Zero Day aggressively wants to have it both ways when it comes to getting close to reality. Sure, virtually every character has a very obvious real-world counterpart and the series is eager to pat you on the head every time you're able to recognize who someone or something is supposed to represent, but the observations never go beyond superficial references to "Russia" or "The Patriot Act." If you take a step or two back and look at the characters, you'll find that they're actually quite the opposite of the characters.
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