Robert De Niro Tries to Save America in Netflix’s High-Profile Mini-Series Zero Day

While our country is in a state of disarray, it is not yet quite as messy as the fictional America of Zero Day (Netflix, February 20), a new political thriller mini-series starring Robert De Niro. In the series, a terrorist cyberattack has rocked the nation, shutting off major communications and electrical grids for exactly one minute, leaving thousands dead. Whoever launched the attack ended their brief siege with an ominous threat that it will, at some unknown point in the future, happen again.

What is a reeling America to do? Well, naturally the federal government calls a former president, De Niro’s one-term POTUS George Mullen, out of retirement and tasks him with leading a virtually omnipotent ad hoc agency designed to unmask and punish the perpetrators. Of course, not everyone in Washington (and beyond) is thrilled about this appointment, nor of the staggering latitude given to the commission. Thus Mullen must navigate the fraught waters of both a high-stakes criminal investigation and mounting civic unrest. To make matters worse, he’s maybe losing his mind, hearing music that no one else can hear and seeing people no one else can see.

Like Carrie Matthison, the drone queen of Homeland, Mullen struggles to untangle the deluding storms of his mind from the actual hard and troubling facts he’s uncovering. Zero Day—created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, and Michael Schmidt, directed by Lesli Linka Glatter—gives itself a heap of complication to sort out, because I suppose that is what knotty espionage thrillers are meant to do. But the show has trouble arranging its many moving parts into one smoothly running machine. Certain plot points, like Mullen’s cognitive issues, rattle in the gearworks. Zero Day is not quite as sleek and sure-footed as it probably wants to be.

It is nonetheless compelling, a sprawling mystery unfolding at steady pace over six episodes. De Niro seems, perhaps, 75 percent committed to the cause, never grimacing with discomfort at all the technobabble he’s forced to speak and taking care to flesh out the emotional burden weighing on Mullen as events begin to echo a past tragedy. Still, De Niro can only do so much with a character whose blandness is the point, one who gradually becomes a shining emblem of that most cherished American value: noble centrism.

Zero Day is not just an engaging techno mystery. It is also, in sometimes tortured fashion, a treatise on how we live in these disunited states now. Throughout the series, much is said in frustrated tones about extremists on both the left and the right. Dan Stevens plays a paranoid, and terribly influential, Alex Jones type, a hectoring crypto libertarian who seems hellbent on sowing discord. The word “pronouns” is angrily spewed at one point—while we’re not exactly supposed to agree with the sentiment, we’re not meant to vehemently disagree with it either.

Zero Day is a thudding, earnest call for sanity, misty eyed about the way politics used to work. It’s opposed to accelerationism but nevertheless eager for this country to restore itself to . . . Actually, I don’t exactly know when Zero Days thinks things were best. Mullen’s elder-statesman pragmatism, marred by concerns about his cognitive abilities, could be seen as an allusion to Joe Biden, a man nearing the end of his career (and life) who heeded a great call to stop one malevolent force and (the hope was) in so doing heal the nation. De Niro is an odd fit for that sort of profile; he’s too gruff, too shaggy to convincingly play such a blandly stalwart, stolid figure. The show around him similarly struggles to turn Mullen into a convincing vessel for its sweeping, pacific message.

Some of the show’s arguments do land, particularly its insistence on standing true to principle amidst an onslaught of personal and professional compromise. Would that there were a few folks in our own government today willing to sacrifice their comfort and clout to divert national catastrophe.

Zero Day’s true asset, though, is its starry cast, an array of notable names who either must have seen the Netflix dump truck full of money backing up their driveways one happy morning or were genuinely inspired by the show’s clarion call for liberal common sense. (Or maybe both!) Joan Allen plays Mullen’s wife, Sheila, who is angling for a seat on the Supreme Court. Lizzie Caplan is their ambitious congresswoman daughter, looking to distance herself from her father’s old-fashioned politics. Connie Britton plays a shrewd chief of staff with some complicated ties to the Mullen family. Jesse Plemons’s ne’er-do-well assistant/fixer, Roger, is equally entwined with the dynasty. Angela Bassett plays the president, suggesting that Zero Day could be part of the Mission: Impossible cinematic universe. These great actors are joined by others: Bill Camp, Matthew Modine, Gaby Hoffman, and more. It’s a kick to watch them all zipping around, saying foreboding things about America.

That urgent mood of impending doom certainly feels appropriate to our times. I wish only that Zero Day was sharper in its pathology, that it didn’t resort to hoary platitude that would be right at home on The West Wing. Zero Day too often feels like a show aimed at a stodgier cohort of viewers who see a wave of confusing new terms, causes, technology, ideologies rushing at them and want simply to swat the whole mass away, to reverse course back to an era of more familiar problems. I can certainly empathize with that instinct, but it does little to actually address contemporary matters. Which isn’t necessarily the job of a TV show. Zero Day, though, often puts itself in that position, climbing atop its soapbox to issue lectures (or sermons) about reconnecting with the fundamental purpose and promise of America. To which many in the audience might fairly respond, “And what, exactly, was that promise, and whom was it ever really for?”