If you have a Netflix account, you've likely been prodded to check out Zero Day, a "political thriller" starring the grumpy liberal activist Robert De Niro in his first television role. If you're on the fence, there are two things you should consider before pressing play.
1) Nicolle Wallace, the MSNBC host, makes several appearances as a fictionalized version of herself, which is to say that her on-screen persona is a relatively stable individual who reads ominous alerts from a teleprompter. In reality, Wallace tends to favor unhinged rants about how an adorable child with brain cancer might kill himself because of something Donald Trump did. She landed the role the old-fashioned way, by sleeping with one of the producers. Wallace's second husband, New York Times reporter (and regular guest on her show) Michael Schmidt, co-created the six-episode series with Noah Oppenheim, the former president of NBC News who reportedly discouraged the network from covering Democratic donor Harvey Weinstein's history of sexual abuse. The previous sentence alone is more compelling than Zero Day in its entirety.
2) It's really bad. Don't waste your time. (Some spoilers below.)
The two points are obviously related. Trust in the media is at an all-time low, mainly because professional journalists and media executives can't relate to anyone outside their elite liberal bubble. They get really annoyed and sanctimonious when the unwashed masses refuse to respect their expertise and ignore their devastating fact checks. There's just no way a couple of fancy journalists steeped in this contemptuous worldview could ever write an interesting story about American politics. And so they have not.
De Niro stars as George Mullen, a former president who stepped down gracefully after healing the country in a single term. He is quite possibly the most respected and honorable man in the entire world. "You were the last president in modern memory who was able to consistently rally bipartisan support," his ghostwriter tells him in an early scene. "Your memoir has the potential to make a real difference." He's a former prosecutor who is extremely passionate about the truth and absolutely despises misinformation. That's fortunate, because when a mysterious cyber villain kills thousands of people by crashing every digital network for 60 seconds and promises to strike again, Mullen is brought out of retirement to save the country. He swore he'd never do it again, but he does.
The government, led by President Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett impersonating Kamala Harris), is about as competent as one would expect from an actual Harris administration. They don't have a clue what's going on, so they put Mullen in charge of a special commission to find the culprit and prevent another attack. It is inexplicably headquartered in Manhattan. Time is of the essence, so they'll just have to commute back and forth to Washington. Mullen gives what is supposed to be a rousing address at the site of a subway crash caused by the attack. He scolds a right-wing protester for getting "worked up over some bullshit conspiracy nonsense" and cleverly suggests it would be better if Americans set aside their differences and came together for the common good.
As head of the "Zero Day" commission, Mullen is given sweeping powers, including the ability to abduct and torture anyone for any reason, which everyone agrees is insane but worth it. What they don't know is that Mullen's brain appears to be unraveling in Bidenesque fashion, his grip on reality warped by dementia or possibly by super-secret CIA microwaves. It doesn't really matter, because this pivotal question (among others) is ultimately resolved with a giant shrug. Either way, nothing will stop Mullen from pursuing the truth.
The plot unfolds as though the writers asked some mid-tier ChatGPT knockoff to imbibe every political headline over the past decade and spit out a script that could mimic the sensation of being zapped with CIA microwaves. The bot appears to have also incorporated a fair amount of liberal fan fiction, perhaps due to being force-fed a grueling diet of Nicolle Wallace. Mullen kidnaps and tortures Evan Green, a celebrity podcaster (Dan Stevens impersonating Tucker Carlson) beloved by "scumbags." His severe pettiness and egomania—also Bidenesque—boils over when Green criticizes the commission (after a random child is abducted from his bed in a SWAT raid) and suggests (accurately, it turns out) that the federal government can't be trusted. Green is simultaneously right-wing and left-wing. Extremism is bad, you see, and centrist elitism is good, even when the extremists are right about the centrist elites being bad. He is innocent, but also slightly racist, so his egregious maltreatment—initially justified by "deep fake" images of mysterious provenance—is shrugged off when he's released and never heard from again.
Mullen is a Democrat, we can only assume. Political affiliations are deliberately vague throughout. This was kind of annoying, but not because, as one reviewer argued, the writers missed an opportunity to clearly explain that Republicans and misinformation are to blame for everything bad that happens. Mullen's daughter, Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan as AOC, obviously), is a firebrand liberal congresswoman from New York with a "big Instagram following." She thinks the commission is "fucking fascist." She hates fascists so much she might even be conspiring with "patriotic" Republicans to crush them in a benevolent coup. She's sleeping with her dad's bodyman (Jesse Plemons), a corrupt influence peddler. It's all very messy. The marquee cast can only do so much.
Portrayed by De Niro with the conviction and charisma of an 81-year-old actor (still younger than Joe Biden) who needs the money to pay alimony and support the child he had last year with his 45-year-old girlfriend, Mullen muddles forth as the investigation stalls and his mind deteriorates. Was it the Russians? Could the most sophisticated cyberattack in history have been pulled off by a group of hippie hackers no one has heard of? Or maybe the "bullshit conspiracy" was right, and there really is a deep-state plot to take over the country? Maybe the whole thing was orchestrated by a bipartisan group of moderate politicians (and their junior staffers who are good at keeping secrets) teaming up with an autistic tech mogul and a billionaire pedophile to instigate a crisis that could be exploited to save the country by amassing unchecked power to pass common-sense solutions to the problems facing everyday Americans? No, that would be ridiculous. Wouldn't it?
One imagines the creators intended Zero Day to be regarded as a serious and "important" work of political fiction with a cerebral message about... something. Good luck figuring it out. Oppenheim explained that one of the "big dynamics" he wanted to explore was the lamentable fact that "objective truth is a subject of debate." We all know what he means by that, even if Zero Day isn't coherent enough to have a point. Wallace and her cohorts at MSNBC, a network that recently settled a defamation lawsuit after falsely accusing a Georgia doctor of harvesting immigrant uteruses, are constantly complaining about the dangers of right-wing misinformation. Oddly enough, the conventional media are largely absent from Zero Day's quest for "truth." It's just Wallace and CNN's Wolf Blitzer and NBC's Savannah Guthrie (who cowrote a children's book with Oppenheim's wife) reporting the facts on television, standing athwart the torrent of lies.
Earlier this week, the New York Times published an op-ed about how "we" were "badly misled" about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, which many now believe was caused by a lab leak in Wuhan. In fact, many believed it at the time, for obvious reasons. The op-ed was published nearly four years after a Times science reporter wondered when "we" would "stop talking about the lab leak theory" and "admit its racist roots." Almost three and a half years after the Times explained that protesting racism was the only "safe" reason to gather in public. If there's any relevant conclusion that can be extracted from Zero Day's cluttered narrative, it is probably one the creators did not intend: Sometimes the "conspiracy theorists" are right.