Robert De Niro’s Netflix Political Thriller Zero Day Holds an Uncanny Mirror to Contemporary Chaos

In an early scene of the Netflix thriller Zero Day, a former U.S. President is visiting the site of a deadly Manhattan subway crash when an onlooker starts shouting about crisis actors. A fight breaks out. Barricades fall. The chaos horrifies George Mullen, a revered leader played by Robert De Niro, who has been summoned to soothe the public after a cataclysmic event. “What’s the matter with you?” he scolds the agitator. “If we keep shouting at each other, what are we gonna accomplish? We’re Americans!… You’re afraid. And you think if you get worked up over some bullsh-t conspiracy nonsense, that won’t make you afraid? No. You’re not behaving like an American, nor a patriot.”

It’s a cathartic rant, even if you’re aware that it takes more than a stern lecture from an authority figure to cure conspiracy thinking—and especially if you’ve been less than impressed with the moral instincts or off-the-cuff oratory of our last few real Commanders in Chief. Intelligent, principled, and brave, Mullen has all the qualities any reasonable person would want in a President. As an admirer marvels, he was also “the last President in modern memory who was able to consistently rally bipartisan support.” Which raises the questions: What political party does Mullen actually represent? What policies did he champion, and what did he accomplish?

We never find out. Creators Eric Newman (American Primeval, the Narcos franchise) and Noah Oppenheim, a former president of NBC News, are so thorough in their avoidance of naming characters’ parties and positions, it must have been a choice. Zero Day is a well-built political thriller, with a superb cast and blockbuster production values. It takes pains to establish an atmosphere of division and distrust that mirrors the present. Yet its evasion of the substance of contemporary American polarization—an increasingly common approach in a Hollywood desperate for hits that will play in red states, blue states, and internationally—undermines that verisimilitude. The show’s extreme efforts to avoid offense, the bromides about truth and liberty it offers in lieu of more specific and potentially controversial insights, feel a bit like a betrayal of its plainspoken hero.

When we meet President Mullen, he is immersed in the pleasures of retirement. Living in bucolic upstate New York, he goes on leisurely morning jogs with his dog, swims in an outdoor pool worthy of Architectural Digest, neglects a long-delayed memoir as his publisher grows impatient. But when the nation is hit with a cyberattack—the power grid briefly crashes, causing accidents that kill thousands, as “This Will Happen Again” appears on every smartphone screen—George is persuaded by the current POTUS (a presidential but underused Angela Bassett) to find the culprit and prevent a second catastrophe. A President’s work is never done, even when he’s no longer President. While Russia emerges as the obvious suspect, evidence points elsewhere. George has the integrity to follow it.

There is a sense that in leading the investigative commission, he is resolving unfinished business. A popular single-term President, he declined to run for re-election after the death of his adult son. (You may well notice parallels to a certain recent occupant of the White House.) But, as ethical and sharp as he usually seems, George is still an elderly man with a bathroom cabinet full of prescriptions. Moments of disorientation coupled with what might be hallucinations force him to question the soundness of his mind—and he’s not the only one.

Netflix was clearly invested in making Zero Day a hit. Directed by prestige-TV fixture Lesli Linka Glatter (Homeland, Mad Men), the six-episode series is as stylish and fleet as any feature thriller and smartly deploys its big-name actors. George’s wife, a judge portrayed by Joan Allen, is worried enough about him to beg his hypercompetent former White House chief of staff (Connie Britton) to join the commission. Lizzy Caplan is George’s aggrieved daughter, Alex, now a Congresswoman. Alex has found a surrogate father in Matthew Modine’s slick House Speaker. Jesse Plemons is George’s in-over-his-head deputy. Gaby Hoffmann, Dan Stevens, and Bill Camp have small but crucial roles.

Zero Day is, among other things, the ultimate example of the so-called dad show. An oasis for men of a certain age amid a TV landscape full of unscripted soaps, Bridgerton clones, and auteur dramedies, dad shows find traditionally masculine, mostly AARP-eligible heroes solving crimes or leading empires or fighting for their families—if not all three at once. Genres vary, from action thrillers like the Idris Elba–led Hijack to medical dramas like The Pitt to the Yellowstone western franchise, starring Kevin Costner and Harrison Ford. The constant is the archetype of one righteous man with the courage to save the day. Zero Day does more than most dad shows to humanize this character, a credit to both the writing and De Niro’s turn as an august leader struggling with his own decline and that of a nation where he once wielded supreme power.

It also makes smart and inventive use of 21st century history to conjure a fictional crisis that feels real. George’s investigation recalls the closely watched work of Robert Mueller. Supporting first responders on the site of the subway crash, he brings to mind a pre-disgrace Rudy Giuliani reassuring a terrified nation after 9/11. Hoffmann’s tech billionaire rings true in the age of surveillance capitalism. One character’s fate has echoes of the Jeffrey Epstein case. Even as the plot twists become a bit far-fetched, the world George inhabits remains grounded in our own.

So vivid is Zero Day’s evocation of contemporary corruption and unrest that its evasiveness on political affiliations plunges it into the realm of the uncanny. We get the sense that Americans were agitated long before the attack, though details remain murky. The show leans hard on assumptions viewers across the political spectrum will bring without challenging any one set. It shares with another recent, cautiously nonpartisan Netflix thriller, The Madness, an inherently uncontroversial abhorrence of extremists, no matter their agenda. One character rages against “half the country caught up in a fever dream of lies and conspiracy, and the other half shouting about pronouns and ranking their grievances”—a nod to reality that’s also a false equivalence for the ages.

In an era when TV aimed at mass audiences, from Netflix’s splashy The Diplomat to Amazon’s dopey spy franchise Citadel, often tries to set stories within governments while avoiding partisan statements, Zero Day stands out for taking on American polarization without so much as identifying its characters’ parties. This limits our grasp of their motives and relationships. That Newman and Oppenheim felt they needed to go to such lengths to keep viewers red, blue, and independent rooting for a hero played by De Niro speaks to how ossified our biases have become, or at least how spooked platforms and creators are by them.

It wasn’t so long ago—about two weeks into Barack Obama’s second term—that Netflix debuted House of Cards, the chronicle of a ruthless Democrat’s rise to power, as its first big original series, apparently without fear of offending liberals. Nor did anyone blink when Shonda Rhimes set Scandal within the White House of a wishy-washy, adulterous GOP President who’d unwittingly stolen an election. Two of Aaron Sorkin’s best-loved projects, The West Wing and The American President, did romanticize Democratic POTUSes. But when the satire Veep neglected to mention its titular VP’s party, it was for good reason. The point was that the people who occupy our halls of power are too plagued by pettiness, vanity, and incompetence to care about ideals.

Of course, Veep’s sycophants, buffoons, and backstabbers bear little resemblance to the vanguard of our latest regime. If Trump 45 was a norm-shattering ringmaster surrounded by faceless enablers, then Trump 47 is just one name in an outré, scandal-ridden mix among whom Elon Musk’s DOGE and its college-age havoc wreakers have become the breakout characters. None of the professional politicians in Zero Day would so giddily court chaos. They make the decisions they make, most of the time, in hopes of preventing it.

Conceived long before Trump took office in January, Zero Day couldn’t have predicted the details of this new era. Yet its unwillingness to mirror the moment in other basic ways makes it as much a victim of our toxic times as it is a plea for moral leadership in the face of them. The blandly universal dilemma it finally puts before George is whether a need for safety and self-protection must necessarily supersede the confrontation of an unpopular truth. It’s a question the creators might have asked themselves.