Zero Day is a political thriller without a political position or even point
Netflix’s new Robert De Niro-led hit series toys with real-world references but hasn’t got the faintest clue what to do with them
Spoilers ahead
For decades, movies and TV shows that feature the president of the United States as a character have tried, often playfully, to keep pace with the headlines. Sometimes they even managed to move a little faster than real-life progress; Morgan Freeman was chosen to lead the nation in Deep Impact a decade before the election of Barack Obama, and plenty of women have occupied the on-screen Oval Office, anticipating a glass-ceiling break that has yet to actually happen.
So at first, the new Netflix series Zero Day comes across like a slightly and understandably mistimed attempt at topicality by focusing on George Mullen (Robert De Niro), a former US president known for bipartisan cooperation, who only served one term before stepping down to deal with the death of his son, and who later works closely with the current president, Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett), a woman of color. The show may have been anticipating a Kamala Harris/Joe Biden dynamic that never quite came to fruition, but on the other hand, Zero Day started filming in 2023, well before Harris replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket in summer 2024, so maybe it should get points for prescience anyway.
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