“When is the last time the country was able to solve any of its problems?” ambitious Congresswoman Alexandra Mullen (Lizzy Caplin) screams at her father and former POTUS George Mullen (Robert De Niro) in Netflix’s just launched Zero Day.
It is a fair question for the six-episode political thriller, and for America 2025.
Certainly, in a week that has seen a sitting U.S. president parroting Kremlin bullet points while his manic billionaire buddy takes a blowtorch to the federal government, the Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim and Michael S. Schmidt created political thriller may provide a much needed sugar high of hope, fictional or not. At the same time, ripped right out of the toxic underbelly of modern America as much as the headlines, the Angela Bassett, Joan Allen, Jesse Plemons, Bill Camp, Connie Britton, Dan Stevens, McKinley Belcher III, and Matthew Modine co-starring Zero Day will show it can happen here, non-fiction or not.
Angela Bassett as President Evelyn Mitchell in Zero Day.
Netflix
Without going into a spoiler-rich chapter and verse of Zero Day, here’s the gist: Out of the chaos of a crippling one-minute long cyber attack that exposes the nation’s vulnerabilities and kills over 3400, President Evelyn Mitchell(Bassett) tasks revered ex-President Mullen to lead an investigation into what happened, and who was behind it.
A task strategically easier said than done, with deep divisions in the country, and now the Zero Day Commission having the ability to suspend of the rule of law to throw fuel on the already blazing extremists on all sides. Add to that, a cunning House Speaker (Modine), tech overlords, Wall Street power brokers, and some White House secrets from Mullen’s single term in office. The show is also full of real-life talking heads such as Savannah Guthrie, Wolf Blitzer and Nicole Wallace with Fox News and ABC banners popping up frequently to further suspend disbelief at the best and worst times in the Lesli Linka Glatter directed series.
With all that, Zero Day is at its core not about attacks foreign and domestic.
Zero Day is about regret.
The regrets of a nearly forgotten and sometimes confused old man who reached the height of power, but, like many a Greek myth and Shakespearean tragedy, lost that most important to him. The regrets of a nation and a world that is watching in real-time as the most powerful nation in history stumbles backwards and downwards. Drawn out over an almost one month period after the initial attack, the lines between fact and fiction blur pretty fast in Zero Day, just like in our echo chamber America.
(L to R) McKinley Belcher III as Carl Otieno, Mozhan Navabi as Melissa Kornblau, Robert De Niro as ex-President George Mullen, Jesse Plemons as Roger Carlson & Connie Britton as former White House Chief of Staff Valerie Whitesell in Zero Day
Netflix
Now, for you tea leaf readers, Zero Day was written and filmed before Kamala Harris ran for President last year and before the Project 2025 juiced Donald Trump was voted back in. For you trivia fans, De Niro’s first small screen lead role. Sadly, perhaps much of what the Oscar winner is doing here will be lost in the blowback the unsweetened Trump critic will undoubtedly be subjected to from the MAGA minions and their kingpin in the days to come. Perhaps, but what does De Niro really care? George Mullen is a role the 81-year-old Great American actor has likely been waiting to play as he goes into the almost sixth decade of his career., and De Niro certainly chews up the screen.
Having said that, though Zero Day on the Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters-run streamer, the show is no House Of Cards. Yes, Zero Day tries to make your chest rise with patriotic pride sometimes, and settles a few geopolitical scores, it’s no West Wing either. There are as many leaps of faith in Zero Day as at an Olympic qualifying trial.
To that, in the short attention span and anecdotal America that we live in, just surf the Zero Day wave.
Where you’ll end up at is a very watchable yarn that plays with some very big ideas and holds together as a bruised and jaded 21st century version of The American President. In its struggle of the soul, national and personal, with a swig or two of liberal cosplay, Zero Day is maybe even a spiritual sequel to the 1995 Michael Douglas flick. Certainly George Mullen could be Douglas’ Andrew Shepherd 30 years later with a few tweaks here and there and some thick glasses – and that’s just dandy, actually.
Again, not to give anything away among the multitude of twists and turns Zero Day takes, but while De Niro is in almost every scene, damn it is sure great to see Joan Allen back on screen too. Here, as former First Lady and federal bench nominee Sheila Mullen, the three-time Oscar nominee emerges deftly as the secret weapon of the series.
Adding to the fun, where you can get it, if linking sociopathic billionaires and other Zero Day characters to thinly veiled real-life players like former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Elon Musk, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jeffrey Epstein, Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson, and even Kamala Harris or perhaps Michelle Obama, to name a few, was a drinking game, you’d be leglessly loaded no more than halfway through the first episode. Being deadly serious as well, if you wondered why ex-POTUS’ like Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden aren’t showing up for real-life America right now as Trump baits a Constitutional crisis like De Niro’s fictional Mullen does in his nation going over the edge – well, join the club.
Maybe, just maybe, Zero Day will inspire them.
As George Mullen says of America in Zero Day, “every time you can do the right thing, it’s another chance to save it.”
Title: Zero Day
Network: Netflix
Premiere date: February 20, 2025, all 6-episodes
Co-Creators / Co-Showrunners / Writers / EPs: Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim
Director/EP: Lesli Linka Glatter
EPs: Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, Michael S. Schmidt , Lesli Linka Glatter, Robert De Niro, Jonathan Glickman
Cast: Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, Lizzy Caplan, Connie Britton, Joan Allen, Bill Camp, Dan Stevens, McKinley Belcher III, with Matthew Modine and Angela Bassett
