Like the Watergate era, political reality hangs over the new Netflix series, with implications for the genre
Robert De Niro stars as a former president investigating a cyberattack in “Zero Day”
24 February 2025 – – Conspiracy thrillers can feel like a dime a dozen in this age of streaming and limited series, with everyone looking for a good binge, filled with suspense and mystery, to take them away from it all, if only for six or eight hours.
Yet amid the chaotic, unsettling nature of the current political moment, such material hits differently, and especially so with Netflix’s latest entry in the genre, “Zero Day,” which consciously leans into current events — down to its slogan, “The Truth Has Been Weaponized” — by conspicuously and self-consciously paralleling them.
In that sense, the 6-episode project that premiered last week potentially lays bare a challenge facing development executives more broadly as they look ahead, to the extent the show’s themes come across as less escapist than exhausting.
Marking his first foray into TV series, Robert De Niro heads a genuinely star-studded cast, playing a former president called out of the wilderness to investigate the origins of a massive and devastating cyberattack (the effects of which, as it happens, vaguely echo the 2009 ABC series “FlashForward”).
That was then, though, and this is now. To progressive pundits and politicians fretting about Donald Trump initiating a constitutional crisis, the image of a government wrestling with moral dilemmas and a dystopian rollback of civil liberties doesn’t exactly resemble a detour into science fiction.
The underlying notion of a threat possibly executed from within the government also comes at a particularly awkward time, after years of President Trump and his acolytes railing against “the deep state,” casting such officials as a nefarious force, while others have cited their role (beginning with his first term) as a buffer against potential abuses of power.
Indeed, the production team on “Zero Day,” which includes co-creators Eric Newman (“Narcos”), former NBC News president Noah Oppenheim and New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt, might have outsmarted themselves a bit by incorporating so many real-world wrinkles designed to evoke hints (or worse) of recognition.
Those flourishes include, but aren’t limited to:
• a very Alex Jones-like conservative podcaster spreading wild disinformation
• a Black female president (played by Angela Bassett)
• a tech billionaire (here female) with shadowy ties
• questions about the former president’s mental acuity; and
• said former president mourning a son who died of a drug overdose, which essentially plays like a cross-the-streams nod to Biden’s sons Beau (who died of brain cancer in 2015) and Hunter (who struggled with addiction)
The broader contours of the plot prove even more distracting, among them grappling with how far the country and its leaders will go in bending the Constitution to thwart a future attack, an issue rooted in the response to the Sept. 11 terror attacks that, again, takes on additional dimensions with Trump back in the White House quoting Napoleon about how someone who “saves his country does not violate any law.”
That social media post drew immediate comparisons to Richard Nixon and his statement to interviewer David Frost in 1977: “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”
The reference seems doubly appropriate in this context, since the cinematic apex of the paranoid conspiracy thriller came in the 1970s, during the aftermath of the Watergate scandal that torpedoed Nixon’s presidency.
Still bathed in those televised hearings as well as the depths of the Cold War, an onslaught of memorable films came out during that time, capitalizing on distrust in government and institutions (and not incidentally, heroic visions of the press) that “All the President’s Men,” the book and movie charting Nixon’s downfall, embodied.
The film version starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman actually hit screens in 1976, landing in the midst of a gilded run of such movies — in sequence, “The Parallax View” (1974), “Three Days of the Condor” (1975), “Marathon Man” (1976), “Capricorn One” (1977), “The Boys From Brazil” (1978) and “The China Syndrome” (1979).
As noted, the genre has become very much in vogue again, thanks in part to streaming, including Netflix’s recent series “The Madness,” which centered on an ambitious CNN commentator, played by Colman Domingo, who gets framed for a white supremacist’s murder, sending him down a rabbit hole of weirdness.
Time called that show “a ’70s-style paranoid thriller for our time” in its review, while noting that at times, “in its quest to frame both ends of the political spectrum as unhinged, the show verges on cartoonish.”
“Zero Day” falls victim to some of the same excesses, but like that aforementioned run of movies, also feels like a product — and in some ways a victim — of its times.
Critics’ reviews were divided, but generally speaking, not overly kind, with descriptions that include some dubbing it “dull dad TV” to “muddled” to “self-serious.”
Granted, TV shows and movies are developed and produced long in advance and can’t always see around corners in terms of what the future might bring. A prime example of that came in 2001, when a trio of fall TV shows that dealt in varying ways with the CIA, spies and terror threats (“24,” “The Agency” and “Alias”) were all temporarily delayed in the wake of Sept. 11.
The producers began work on the show in 2021, and while some of the parallels were clearly intended, others were, as Newman put it, “just this sort of unbelievable coincidence.” That said, Oppenheim also noted the plot was informed by his and Schmidt’s connections as journalists, and that the two “called upon our network of relationships” in dramatizing how the government might respond to such events.
So if reality inadvertently intruded in some respects, “Zero Day” appears to have consciously leaned into it in others. While that might be a shrewd device in terms of garnering attention, given the chaotic nature of the news cycle, for those in Hollywood such an approach can easily become, as it did here, a zero-sum game.
