Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A senile former president begins grabbing people off the streets and persecuting his political opponents, while his corrupt associates pursue their own petty schemes. Zero Day is the show that dares to wonder what would happen if this far-out, science-fictional, dystopian scenario were ever to come to pass. Fortunately, It Can’t Happen Here, right?
It feels a bit like cheating to apply the rubric of The Current Unpleasantness to this show, though, because Zero Day is studiously anti-political. I don’t say apolitical, because all art is political; Zero Day is anti-political, because it’s an attempt to make a political thriller in which “political” describes the setting but nothing else . To be fair, this is the case with many political thrillers. It is not true of The Manchurian Candidate or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or Michael Clayton — you know, the political thrillers that are really really good.
At first glance, asserting this about Zero Day might look crazy. I mean, there’s “politics” all over this thing. There are hawks and doves, hardliners and bleeding hearts, conspiracists and empiricists, scheming congresspeople and bloviating talking heads. Russia is bad, Israel is good, America is great, the Constitution is sacrosanct. Politics!
What’s more, George Mullen’s actions in attempting to take down the Reapers, a nebulous network of disaffected left-wing hackers, genuinely do mirror America’s metastasizing authoritarianism during the 21st century. True, Mullen rejects the encouragement of his intelligence chief Carl Otieno (McKinley Belcher III) to utilize “enhanced interrogation techniques,” a Bush-era euphemism for torture, and insists upon applying for arrest warrants even though he’s been granted the unconstitutional ability to go without them. But once he has his chief suspect, a bookish veteran named Erik Hayes (Colin Donnell), in his clutches, Mullen gets medieval. He threatens to have the man’s War on Terror interpreter deported, to have his mother’s Medicare cut off, and to have his child placed in foster care — deportation, the destruction of the social safety net, and family separation, all in one shot.
But as the episode progresses, it becomes clear that neither George nor anyone else on the show fits on a political spectrum we’d recognize as existing at any point during this sad American century. Pop quiz: To what political party does George belong? Is his daughter, Alex, in the opposition party? What about her apparent boss, Speaker Dreyer? President Mitchell? Shrieking news influencer Evan Green? Shady, possibly pedophilic billionaire Bob Lyndon? Zero Day may know, but it isn’t telling.
But okay, forget party entirely: To what political wing do any of them even belong? Dreyer is clearly a right-wing type, but he’s passionately demagoguing about the violation of leftists’ civil liberties. Alex comes across like an AOC in terms of affect, but she’s working directly for Dreyer while attempting to hamstring her Biden-coded dad. Green looks and sounds right at home on the Ben Shapiro/Matt Walsh spectrum, but he refers to the left-wing Reapers as hard-working Americans whose rights should be defended and defends a mother whose child has been taken from her by government thugs. He also really hates billionaire Bob, while billionaire Bob thinks war with Russia would be good for business. Mitchell’s politics are completely opaque; all we really know is she’d prefer picking a fight with a nuclear superpower to rounding up a few dozen Discord users. All of these people seem to hate each other on ideological grounds, but we’re never really even told what those ideologies are.
Again, there have been many, many political thrillers the politics of which consist solely of “corruption and authoritarianism are bad,” and since until recently this has been the bipartisan consensus there has historically been little need to go beyond that. But at a certain point, a refusal to depict politics as it exists when you’re telling a story about presidents and congresspeople and civil liberties violations and so on obscures more than it reveals, even simply as entertainment. That lack of politics isn’t apolitical at all: it’s a politics of cowardice, or worse, appeasement.
Granted, this is a lot to lay at the feet of a basically harmless late-career Bobby D. potboiler. It’s actually increasingly entertaining as far as that goes, tracking the parallel stories of George’s growing detachment from reality and his right-hand man Roger’s deepening involvement in multiple scandals and conspiracies. (In addition to being on Bob’s payroll and in Alex’s bed, he’s also in contact with George’s Mossad ally behind his back, and a recovering drug addict in conflict with his replacement as chief of staff, Valerie.)
The episode’s high point, then, comes as these two threads converge. Convinced that Green, whom he repeatedly hallucinates is conversing with him through the television, helped plan the Zero Day attack, Mullen has the popular pundit black-bagged and abducted from his home in the middle of the night. Even as this goes down, Roger flips through his boss’s notebook on a whim, eyes glazing with growing horror as he sees just how much George has truly lost it. (The repeated “Who Killed Bambi?” needle drop during his freakouts is genuinely inspired, by the way.) Zero Day is hardly the first TV show to correctly treat Jesse Plemons as a load-bearing element of the production; those wordless closeups on his eyes as he reads the journal say more than any dialogue could here.
And I’ll say this for Zero Day: Though its unwillingness to really throw an explicitly political punch hurts it, its point of view regarding George’s selfishness and overreach in continuing to spearhead the all-important Zero Day Commission is perfectly clear. Maybe his mental capacity and lucidity really are breaking down. Maybe he’s been dosed with some kind of unprescribed medication, as he at least believes he discovers when he goes through his medicine cabinet and double checks with his pharmacist. Maybe he’s being manipulated, as is clearly the case when Lyndon has Roger present him with obviously doctored photos establishing a link between Green and Anna Sindler, the questionably dead ghost writer he thinks he saw after she was allegedly killed. But whatever it is, he should tell someone, for crying out loud! The fact that he’s trying to gut his way through it is presented as a personal, ethical, even moral shortcoming, and that’s to be commended in an era where politicians cling to power while visibly and audibly deteriorating on camera. Not even a mentally competent person should have the power he’s been given. When the mentally incompetent grab the reins, god help us all.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
