Robert De Niro has become the latest A-list movie star to sign on to a streaming series, and given his selection of movie roles over the last few years, we wondered why he hasn’t crossed over sooner. In the new Netflix thriller Zero Day, he plays a popular former president tasked with leading a commission that will try to stop a second cyberattack after an initial attack causes chaos for exactly one minute.
ZERO DAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: We see lights flash inside a house and lots of pictures of someone who has had a long, very public career. Then we see someone furiously try to open a safe.
The Gist: The man trying to open the safe is former President George Mullen (Robert De Niro), and he’s forgetting the combination to his own safe. Someone’s pounding on the door. He breaks a picture of himself and two of his close friends from their military days in the ’70s. He then realizes the date on the back of the photo is the combination.
Three days earlier, Mullen is going through his routine at his Hudson, NY home. Wake up, go swimming, jog with the dog, then sit down for breakfast made by his aide Hector (Geoffrey Cantor). He gets a folder with the daily briefing, and reads the paper and sees the announcement that his wife Sheila (Joan Allen) will be confirmed for a federal appellate court judgeship.
For the most part, it’s a normal day. He meets with a ghostwriter sent by his publisher; he owes them a memoir and has been dragging his feet on that. We learn from her visit that Mullen obsessively journals, was a uniter as president, and only served one term because his son died during his first term.
After the ghostwriter leaves, suddenly there’s a total systems outage, due to a cyberattack. Phones go out, and signaling systems for trains, subways and other modes of transportation shut off. It only lasts for a minute, but the chaos results in thousands of deaths. Devices display a message saying “THIS WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.”
In the aftermath, Mullen is paid a visit by Roger Carlson (Jesse Plemons), a former aide. The administration of the current president, Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett), has asked him to ask Mullen to visit with some first responders and calm some nerves. Part of the reason is that the White House, law enforcement and intelligence organizations have no idea who was able to shut down all of these systems at the same time.
After a visit to Manhattan where Mullen ends up addressing an unruly group of protesters and conspiracy theorists, President Mitchell calls him to The White House and asks him to lead a commission to find out who did this and try to stop another, more extensive attack. The commission will have wide-ranging powers, including the ability to authorizesearches and seiszures, suspend habeus corpus, and more.
As he considers the position, his daughter Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan), a liberal congressperson, tries to get him to turn the president down, given that the commission is, in her words, “fucking fascist.” The idea is that the government doesn’t want to find out who did it, “they want to weaponize it.” He ends up accepting the position, but he has more to contend with than just cyberattackers.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim and Michael Schmidt, Zero Day certainly has a Homeland feel to it (the series’ director, Lesli Linka Glatter, also directed Homeland).
Our Take: Like many thriller series that are rooted in the kinds of terrorism that could happen in the real world, Zero Day is both scary and eye rolling. The show certainly isn’t subtle, whether it’s portraying Mullen as a bipartisan consensus builder and what seemed to be the last popular president, or showing just how dangerous the powers the commission he’s leading can be if put in the wrong hands.
Of course, that’s the scary part. From the cyberattack to the power grab, these are things that are entirely plausible (and, in some cases, currently happening) in our world. Given De Niro’s mostly calm, measured performance as Mullen, we’re led to believe that having him in charge of this commission will lead to a sensible application of these wide-ranging powers, with his background as a prosecutor and his deep reservoir of contacts will help them quickly get to the bottom of this attack.
Until the last few minutes, though, the first episode is a frustrating exercise in withholding information from the viewers. When Mullen meets with Lasch (Bill Camp), the CIA director, they go into a conference room where a flip of a switch makes the windows opaque and the sound buzzes. Phone calls are obscured by helicopter noise. Those types of manipulations tells us that critical information is being kept from us, and all we want to do is call the show’s writers and say “Just tells us! It’s not going to ruin things!”
But the end of the episode, when we’re back in Mullen’s office with him furiously trying to open his safe, only to find a notebook with the phrase “Who killed Bambi?” repeatedly written in it, makes us think that the likely eightysomething Mullen is having some cognitive issues that he isn’t acknowledging. How that will affect his decision-making, of course, is more or less the crux of this series. We also wonder if events from his past, especially what he experienced in the military, will come home to roost while he runs this commission.
What we did appreciate is that De Niro is surrounded by a fantastic cast, from Allen to Caplan to Plemons to Bassett. We’ve yet to see Connie Britton as Mullen’s former chief of staff Valerie Whitesell, and we’re pretty sure that Matthew Modine, who plays House speaker Richard Dreyer, will have a more significant role than what we saw in the first episode. Between the cast and the portion of the plot where Mullen’s mind starts playing tricks on him, there’s more than enough to keep watching, even if the writing lacks any sort of subtlety.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Mullen goes into his kitchen to find a different cook. Sheila tells him that Hector retired a few years prior.
Sleeper Star: We always like seeing and hearing from Bill Camp, mainly because he has a voice that’s both soothing and officious at the same time.
Most Pilot-y Line: We’re curious as to what the relationship was between Plemons’ character Roger and Caplan’s character Alexandra, because it seems like it was more than just colleagues. Again, this is info that doesn’t need to be obscured from the viewers.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The cast of Zero Day is the main reason why we’re going to keep watching, but the final moments of the first episode gave the story more intrigue than what we’ve seen from terrorism thrillers in the recent past.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
