On Screen: “Zero Day”
Zero Day
One of 2025’s most anticipated new Netflix releases — “Zero Day” — marking Robert De Niro’s first leading role in a television series — is a dreadful disappointment. Obviously green-lit before the Trump tidal wave swept the presidential election, it’s filled with unfulfilled promises.
As a political thriller, it has a provocative premise: a catastrophic terrorist cyberattack disables computers throughout the nation. Planes crash. Cars collide. Hospitals shut down. Wall Street, including the New York Stock Exchange, halts. All forms of digital communication cease to exist. The concept is truly terrifying.
Fear reigns — so the president of the United States (Angela Bassett) turns to former President George Mullen (De Niro) to head a task force with infinite powers to find out what happened and make sure it doesn’t occur again.
“We need a result everyone can trust, and everyone trusts you,” she explains.
Unfortunately, believability erodes as soon as Mullen is shown doing his morning exercise routine, including swimming and running solo in the woods near his rural home. Secret Service protocols would never, ever allow that to happen.
Then it becomes obvious that octogenarian Mullen is coping with serious mental issues. Ever since his son died, he’s had hallucinations and keeps hearing the same chaotic Sex Pistols song — “Who Killed Bambi?” — in his head.
Has he been brainwashed, like in “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962)? Or is this perhaps linked to the sounds reported by U.S. diplomats in Havana, Cuba, that were thought to be sonic attacks?
One could only wish! Instead, suspicions implicate Russian agents, a leftist hacktivist collective, a speaker of the house (Matthew Modine), a provocative talk show pundit (Dan Stevens) and an extremist tech billionaire (Gaby Hoffman).
Murky melodrama reigns as Mullen’s alienated daughter (Lizzy Caplan), a New York congresswoman, is involved with her father’s harried fixer (Jesse Plemons) who’s being blackmailed by a hedge fund honcho (Clark Gregg).
Aside from his mysterious Israeli contact (Mark Ivanir) and long-suffering wife (Joan Allen), the only person Mullen will listen to is his former chief of staff (Connie Britton) with whom he secretly had an illegitimate daughter years ago.
The six-part limited series — created by Eric Newman (“Narcos”) with journalists Noah Oppenheim and Michael J. Schmidt and directed by TV veteran Lesli Linka Glatter (“Love & Death”) — should have been so much better!
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Zero Day” is a paranoid, anxiety-propelled, frustrating 5 — with all six episodes streaming on Netflix.
Susan Granger is a product of Hollywood. Her natural father, S. Sylvan Simon, was a director and producer at M.G.M. and Columbia Pictures. Her adoptive father, Armand Deutsch, produced movies at M.G.M.
As a child, Susan appeared in movies with Abbott & Costello, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Margaret O’Brien, and Lassie. She attended Mills College in California, studying journalism with Pierre Salinger, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism.