A chilling throwback to cautionary Chilly Struggle-era fables like Fail Protected and Seven Days in Might, the well timed and taut six-part political conspiracy thriller Zero Day (from Narcos showrunner Eric Newman and NBC Information alum Noah Oppenheim) juggles sufficient worst-case situations to show the viewer right into a basket case.
In a uncommon TV function, Robert De Niro initiatives the required authority and gravitas to attempt to calm a frantic and fractured nation as former president George Mullen, a one-term chief who stepped down within the wake of a household tragedy. He’s known as out of retirement by the present president (the formidable Angela Bassett) to go a fee to root out the unknown terrorists who paralyzed the U.S. with a sudden and devastating, although mercifully transient, cyberattack that hijacked American infrastructure and transportation, leading to hundreds of casualties.
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Inflicting alarm with the widespread warning, “It will occur once more,” the “Zero Day” occasion fuels monetary panic and mob mayhem amid waves of disinformation (so what else is new). After some persuasion, Mullen takes the reins of the brand new fee, pleading, “If we maintain shouting at one another like this, what are we going to perform?” Quickly sufficient, outspoken critics emerge, together with Matthew Modine because the opposition’s Speaker of the Home, who’s not above weaponizing the disaster for political acquire, Dan Stevens as an opportunistic fringe-media blowhard, and Gaby Hoffmann as a disruptive tech mogul. They despair that Group Mullen’s unregulated borderline-torture techniques could also be a treatment worse than the illness.
They’re not fully fallacious, and even those that know Mullen greatest — together with his spouse (Joan Allen), an appellate courtroom candidate, his estranged congresswoman daughter (Lizzy Caplan), his loyal right-hand man (Jesse Plemons), and former chief of employees (Connie Britton) — start to have good purpose to query his emotional and psychological stability. Or are they being performed as nicely?
Because the scope of the conspiracy comes into focus, Mullen delivers a problem that resonates uncannily in at the moment’s actual world: “Destroying democracy is just not the best way to reserve it.” Or, as Zero Day asks, if the lights exit once more, will we be left in darkness?
Zero Day, Restricted Sequence Premiere (six episodes), Thursday, February 20, Netflix