Zero Day - Review

The Political Thriller That Thinks Watching CNN Counts as Action

So Zero Day is Netflix’s latest attempt at making a political thriller that’s both House of Cards and Mr. Robot—except it’s neither, and somehow also worse. What we get instead is a six-episode slog through bureaucracy, boomer paranoia, and the political equivalent of a badly written Twitter thread. It’s a show that really wants to be smart, but mostly just points at real-world problems like a toddler pointing at a spilled sippy cup.

Let’s start with the good—or rather, the potentially good. Robert De Niro plays George Mullen, a retired one-term president who gets yanked out of his post-presidency memoir-writing, legacy-polishing, probably-golfing existence to lead a commission investigating a cyberattack that shut down America for one whole minute. (Somehow, in that 60 seconds, 3,000 people die—which, okay, I have questions.) Naturally, the hackers threaten a second attack, so it’s up to Mullen and his elite team of… bureaucrats… to figure out who’s responsible before America goes full Purge.

Sounds compelling, right? Well, it could have been—if the show didn’t get distracted with so much pointless filler. Instead of, y'know, solving the cyberattack, we get endless roundtable discussions, slow-burn non-reveals, and a lot of Very Serious People staring at news broadcasts that add zero new information. The show spends so much time making sure we understand the stakes that it forgets to actually raise them. It’s like watching someone explain how a chess game works while never making a move.

And look, if you’re going to make a thinly veiled political drama, at least have the courage to go all in. Instead, Zero Day plays coy. It desperately wants you to connect the dots to real-world figures, but does it in the most ham-fisted way possible. De Niro’s Mullen? He’s a mix of Biden’s public persona and Hollywood’s idealized version of what a Good President should be. Angela Bassett plays President Evelyn Mitchell, a “historic first” leader who might as well have Kamala stitched into her power suits—but, oops, she gets barely any screen time. Jesse Plemons’ Roger Carlson? A troubled but cunning insider with Tucker Carlson energy. Lizzy Caplan as Mullen’s daughter? She’s basically AOC if she swapped policy discussions for cyber terrorism. Every character is a political reference you can recognize in two seconds—but the show never does anything interesting with them.

Then there’s the big twist—the hackers aren’t foreign actors, they’re domestic elites, including Mullen’s own daughter and the House Speaker (Matthew Modine, who deserved better). Their evil master plan? Cause a national catastrophe to “unify” the country. Uh, okay. That’s a bit like burning down your house to solve your bad Wi-Fi. The worst part? Zero Day treats this like a mic-drop moment, when most of the audience probably saw it coming three episodes ago.

Visually, the show is sleek but way too dark—literally. If you try watching this in a well-lit room, congrats, you’re now listening to a radio drama. And let’s talk pacing: every episode teases some big break in the case, only for it to amount to nothing. Arrests are made, suspects are tortured, and in the end? Oops, wrong guy! See you next episode for more of the same. It’s a rinse-and-repeat cycle that turns what could’ve been a tight, gripping political thriller into a bloated, frustrating slog.

And yet, through all the mess, the actors still give it their all. De Niro does his best with a script that saddles him with grief, guilt, and possibly dementia, but the writing never fully lets him go for it. Plemons is fantastic, but his character is given just enough intrigue to be interesting without ever actually paying it off. Caplan is a standout, balancing her role as both devoted daughter and domestic conspirator, but even she can’t save a finale that fumbles everything it was building toward.

At six episodes, Zero Day somehow still feels too long, which is usually a sign that it should have just been a movie—or better yet, not made at all. Fans of the show will argue that it’s all very “realistic,” but let’s be honest: realism isn’t the same as entertaining. Watching someone do their taxes is realistic too, but that doesn’t mean I want six hours of it.

Final verdict? 1.5 out of 5 Bryans. One Bryan for Plemons and Caplan, half a Bryan for effort. But the show itself? About as thrilling as watching C-SPAN on mute