“Zero Day,” premiering Thursday on Netflix, is the vehicle that Robert De Niro, whose picture appears next to “actor” in the dictionary of our mind, has chosen to drive, for the first time in his six-decade career, onto television. (Not counting “Saturday Night Live” cameos.) Let’s make him welcome.
De Niro plays former U.S. President George Mullen. After a brief prologue that finds him frantically fiddling with the combination to a safe as something chaotic happens on the other side of a door, we jump back a few days to a quieter time. We meet him doing his morning this and that, swallowing pills (he is old, after all, but we will keep coming back to those pills), doing laps in his pool, jogging with the dog, checking the bird feeder. Wife Sheila (Joan Allen) is not on site, but we can see from a cannily displayed newspaper headline that she is a personage herself, nominated to the Federal Court of Appeals. Mullen meets with a potential ghostwriter sent hopefully to help with his overdue memoir. We learn in this meeting that the ex-president shocked the world by not running for virtually guaranteed reelection — something about his son, but “there are those who say there are other reasons.”
No sooner has this block of exposition concluded than a cyberattack cripples every system in the U.S.A., including all the ones that had been thought invulnerable. Total blackout! (Zero Day is a real-world term to describe a cyber breach for which there is no immediate remedy.) When something this huge happens in the movies or on television, it is usually the work of aliens, announcing their arrival in a big way — for good or ill, nobody knows, aliens being the inscrutable creatures they are. (They just get things wrong sometimes, it’s not necessarily their fault.) But this deviltry is merely terrestrial. Planes crash, and trains clash, and thousands die. After a minute, the power returns, and everyone with a phone gets the message, “This will happen again.” No ransom is asked, no responsibility taken. A clock is ticking.
After an inspirational speech at the site of a subway disaster, made at the prompting of his beloved former aide, Roger Carlson (Jesse Plemons), Mullen is drafted by sitting President Evelyn Mitchell — played by Angela Bassett, and, yes, in this fantasy the country has managed to elect a Black woman to the job — to head a special investigative commission, endowed by Congress with “extraordinary powers commensurate with the scale of this emergency … powers of surveillance, powers of search and seizure, if necessary even the suspension of habeas corpus.” This doesn’t sound good, but Mullen, “the last president in modern memory who was able to consistently rally bipartisan support,” is deemed to be the man not to abuse the job. His secret service code name is “Legend.”
Less sanguine about this situation is Mullen’s daughter, Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan), a second-term congresswoman, whose youth, name and “big Instagram following” may not be meant to suggest the actual representative from New York’s 14th Congressional District; decide for yourself. She has nonpolitical gripes with her father, as well. (But he likes her fine.) Also opposed is Speaker of the House Richard Dreyer (Matthew Modine), and though his rhetoric is calm and reasonable, one pegs him as a villain at first glance. He is too smooth, too tall and his hair is too white.
Lizzy Caplan plays Mullen’s daughter, Alexandra, a congresswoman.
(Jojo Whilden/Netflix)
It is suggested by more than one person that Mullen doesn’t understand that the world has changed since he was president not all that many years ago. One who suggests this is Sheila, who enlists Valerie Whitesell (Connie Britton), Mullen’s old efficient chief of staff, to return to his side — even though the two women have issues with each other. Most of these characters have issues with other characters; you may want to keep notes.
As if that weren’t enough, Mullen has started to hear and see things, most distressingly the Sex Pistols (minus Johnny Rotten, plus Tenpole Tudor) song “Who Killed Bambi?” and to scribble the title over and over, Jack Torrance-style. The choice of song may be legitimately be considered torture, for the victim and for the viewer.
And as if that weren’t enough, for good measure there are Russians. There are hacktivists. There is a super-powerful tech mogul (Gaby Hoffman) and a rich Wall Street creep (Clark Gregg); there is a hypocritical alternative media loudmouth (Dan Stevens). There are “radical leftists,” so you shouldn’t get the idea there is some sort of woke agenda behind this drama.
Given the dystopian antifactual farce that is Washington today, there’s something odd about watching any kind of fiction set there. As crazy as things are in this story, as daffy the solution to its central mystery, the political world as pictured here is peopled with qualified professionals, who may not agree on things, and may in some cases be mainly out for themselves, and may be compromised in one way or another — most everyone here is — but still operate in a refreshing atmosphere of at least superficial politesse. (Out on the streets it’s a different thing — there will be plenty of unhinged demonstrations before “Zero Day” concludes its business.)
The series has something to say about political overreach and the slippery slope to fascism, and demagoguery, with some novel ideas about extremism in the service of moderation, but it strenuously avoids any sort of partisan blame — this may be its most fantastical, incredible element. No mention here of Republican or Democrat or indication, just “parties” and “sides of the aisle.” One might make certain assumptions as to where on the spectrum certain characters fall — and there are hints, such as Mullen relating something Adlai Stevenson once told him, and a photo showing him with Bono and the Edge. But George Bush probably has one of those. (Checks — yup.)
Created by Eric Newman (“Griselda”), New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt and former NBC News president Noah Oppenheim and well directed throughout by Lesli Linka Glatter (“Homeland”), it’s a big production, rich in locations, rich in materiel, rich in extras for the crowd scenes (always a sign of dedication), rich in black SUVs, rich in dark suits, rich in cameos from TV news personalities. It’s the sort of star-spangled prestige production that half a century ago would have starred Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood and been filmed in black-and-white, even though color was an option.
It’s entertaining, in that old-fashioned way, if not as witty as they used to make them, but the cast, being superior to the material, keep things convincing enough. At six episodes, it’s shorter than many such streaming dramas, and yet it’s so stuffed with business — conspiracy business, family business, romantic business, “Who Killed Bambi?” business — that “Zero Day” does grow a little exhausted, a little wobbly, as it nears the finish line.
As to De Niro, his presence is what makes the series more than usually interesting — and whose political opinions, in at least one respect, have not been veiled (and one would say, with the person he’s playing). Even in a bad movie, he’s worth checking out, and as the center of a big, long series that evidently meant enough to him to put in the time and the work, you can’t accuse him of phoning it in: It’s a thoughtful, unshowy, completely credible performance in which the movie star nevertheless shows through. Like his character, his powers haven’t dimmed with age, whatever the whippersnappers might think, and if both have made a few bad decisions in a long career, not even Superman is perfect anymore. He’s still a hero.
