A good political thriller is more precious than jewels, the Good Book says. Or it should, anyway, given that bad ones, like the poor, will always be with us. Who today would sit willingly through 2006’s The Sentinel, in which a there-for-the-paycheck Michael Douglas conducts a steamless affair with first lady Kim Basinger? Or Charlie Sheen’s blindingly awful Shadow Conspiracy (1997), mocked by the Washington Post for channeling “a greasy, tubby George Stephanopoulos”?
Even well-received efforts in the genre can age like crab meat in a locked car. Rod Lurie’s The Contender was one of the best movies of 2000 but feels now like a Lewinski-era time capsule, so dated are its sexual assumptions. To rewatch House of Cards is to be appalled that we ever liked it in the first place. If, as the French monarchist Joseph de Maistre famously remarked, “every nation gets the government it deserves,” the same is plainly untrue of government-themed entertainment. Politics simply move too fast for any but the most skilled screen artists to keep up. For every indispensable All the President’s Men, we get a dozen Manchurian Candidate remakes collapsing under the weight of their own irrelevance.
Looked at in a certain light, Netflix’s new limited series Zero Day seems designed to avoid exactly this predicament. Though the production’s time and place are our own, specific political parties go scrupulously unnamed. Donald Trump, tomorrow’s old news, doesn’t so much as exist. Neither do the momentary passions (hello, Ukraine) that might forever bind the narrative to the present decade. Instead, Netflix’s latest gazes across deeper ideological divides: freedom versus security, the people versus their bureaucratic betters. The result ought to feel as ageless as a Stradivarius violin. Why, then, does the show have all the resonance of a dime-store, plywood knockoff?
The answer is surely not a failure of casting ambition. In addition to leading man Robert De Niro, Zero Day features authentic movie stars Joan Allen and Angela Bassett, as well as such small-screen favorites as Jesse Plemons, Connie Britton, Lizzy Caplan, and Dan Stevens. If my back-of-the-envelope math is correct, the ensemble has three dozen Academy Award and Emmy nominations to its name, to say nothing of the plaudits won by Lesli Linka Glatter (Mad Men, Homeland), who directed all six episodes.
The problem, evident almost from the start, is that no one on screen is very good in this production. Not De Niro, who delivers one of the most perfunctory performances of his career. Not Plemons, usually excellent but jumpy and mannered here. Not even Caplan, whose one-note portrayal of a quarrelsome congresswoman is enough to make one yearn for the subtleties and emotional shadings of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Nor is Zero Day’s plot any help. The program tells the story of a computer hack that causes widespread death and mayhem, setting America on war footing and prompting the creation of an autocratic investigatory body. Run by former president George Mullen (De Niro), the so-called Zero Day Commission must find the parties responsible without abusing its extraconstitutional powers. Rather than exploring this tension, however, Zero Day exploits it, trading nuanced storytelling for increasingly poisonous “reveals.” Why plumb the irreconcilable demands of liberty and safety when one can make a paint-by-numbers melodrama in which every player is a grifter, traitor, or fool?
Such pessimism might have been darkly compelling had it been presented coherently. Sadly, Netflix’s production throws out the baby of rational screenwriting with the bathwater of partisan signifiers. Take, for instance, Stevens’s role as a Tucker Carlson-inspired cable news firebrand. A racist and a reactionary, Stevens’s character hawks MAGA-coded “merch” even as his supporters denounce Mullen as “Deep-State George.” Yet the TV host is also a friend of leftist radicals and an enemy of Russia. It is one thing to veil a man’s party identification in the service of dramatic art. It is another to so scramble his beliefs that no conceivable ideological movement could claim him.
And what of the concessions the show does make to its particular political moment? For all of its pretensions to timelessness, Zero Day can hardly go an episode without referencing “mental health” or “controlling the narrative.” Neither can the writers resist giving an Elon Musk stand-in the Jeffrey Epstein treatment. (No, it isn’t suicide.) Strangest of all, the series plays like a “Thank You Brandon” tribute to our luckless 46th president. De Niro’s Mullen is a one-term chief executive with cognitive problems and a dead son. His successor in office, a black woman (Bassett), is in over her head and can do nothing without her former boss’s assistance. So pronounced is the allusion that one imagines a straightforward quid pro quo between Netflix’s chiefs and Joe Biden: “Drop out of the race quietly, and we will lionize you in a star-studded, six-episode thriller.”
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In short, Zero Day is a travesty. Yet even its many mistakes might have added up to something workable had not its creators leaned on a dead-tired organizational trope. Like most shows that backload their narrative disclosures, Netflix’s series places its characters in a peculiar stasis, able neither to reveal their true motives nor act decisively until the final half-hour. The consequence is a show with no real surprises. We know that information is being withheld to keep us streaming. In the meantime, it doesn’t matter what choices the men and women on screen make. Nothing they do will bring a swifter resolution than Netflix desires.
Is Zero Day “regime propaganda,” as the Free Press’s River Page has argued in a pointed review? I suppose it wants to be. Ultimately, though, the show is too cynical to move the needle in any direction but one. That man with the American flag on his lapel? He is my enemy.
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.
