De Niro makes paranoid conspiracy thriller a Netflix hit

Viewers will find themselves absorbed by the landscape of Robert De Niro’s face as he plays a former president in political mystery Zero Day, his first appearance in a TV series.

(L to R) Robert De Niro as George Mullen and Jesse Plemons as Roger Carlson in Episode 101 of Zero Day. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024

Another engrossing story of duplicity, betrayal and deception, gripping and prescient, Zero Day, a taut paranoid conspiracy thriller, has become the latest Netflix hit series.

And as is so often the case with great espionage narratives, patriotism and a warped sense of duty are at its centre.

As is the great actor Robert De Niro, making his first appearance in a TV series, heading a cast list that includes Jesse Plemons, Angela Bassett, Lizzy Caplan and Mathew Modine. De Niro’s appearance is another triumph for a once disdained medium that has, arguably, overtaken cinema in cultural dominance.

Director of the series is the redoubtable Lesli Linka Glatter, who has directed more than 150 episodes of shows such as Twin Peaks, Homeland, The Newsroom and Justified. And she provides a sure creative hand in navigating a huge budget, the starry cast, and a complex, diffuse script full of clamorous set pieces.

The six-part drama, centred on a disastrous cyber-attack on America, originated in a conversation between producer Eric Newman and his friend Noah Oppenheim, then president of NBC News, he told online magazine Parade. “I asked him about where we were going as a country, in terms of how we process our news,” he recalled in the interview.

“And what he said horrified me, which is that we are moving towards mutually exclusive alternate realities that have to coexist despite their diametrical opposition to one another. It sparked in us a conversation about, how do we tell a story that says that, without really vilifying either side.”

Somewhat inspired, they sought out Michael S. Schmidt, a Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter for The New York Times, who became Zero Day’s third co-creator. “At the time, he was trying to write a story about a very important investigation that was hampered by the mental acuity of the man leading the investigation,” Newman says.

“So from that, we came up with this idea about telling a story about an essential investigation, a fact-finding mission, where the investigator’s mechanism by which truth is determined is broken, which is a stand-in for us.”

It should be pointed out they started writing this drama well before concerns about Joe Biden’s fitness and the way he was stumbling over numbers and words, losing his train of thought, and struggling to finish sentences, gained purchase and credibility. “At the time when we came up with this idea, Biden’s mental acuity wasn’t even a conversation,” Newman says. “Maybe in the White House somewhere, someone’s saying, ‘Hey, you know, the boss was a little off today’, but in November of ’21, it wasn’t even a thing. We were very surprised to see some of the things we wrote about start to play out in reality.”

Their aim was to examine the way facts have become so intertwined with opinion, spin, conspiracy theory and straight-up lies due to the widespread breakdown of trust in government and media, and the way alternative sources now share their own versions of the truth.

The series is about what can be done in the national interest, though it’s never quite clear which side is operating from the position of moral superiority.

Jesse Plemons and Robert De Niro are seen on the set of "Zero Day" on Wall Street on April 27, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

It cleverly blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction, and you constantly ask yourself could any of this really happen? And if it did, could America actually cope? How would an American government respond when left and right can never agree on just what is fact and what is real?

Robert De Niro is the man leading the investigation. He’s former president George Mullen, a popular figure from an America when politics were less rancid, less divisive. Mullen is chosen by Angela Bassett’s President Evelyn Mitchell, to lead a new super-constitutional authority to hunt down those responsible after a cyberattack has brought America to its knees.

The show starts with unknown hackers shutting down America’s power grid for a calamitous one minute, causing the deaths of thousands of people. A message is sent to every cell phone with the ominous threat “THIS WILL HAPPEN AGAIN”. It’s apparently a “Zero Day” attack, a broad term describing security vulnerabilities used to attack systems, only “zero days” possible in which to resolve it.

But Mullen, called in to investigate, is from the start hampered by hallucinations that have him questioning just what is real. The story suggests it might possibly be caused by a weapon called Proteus, a cyber weapon developed by the National Security Agency to inflict brain injuries from a distance with surgical precision. And which is largely untraceable.

Mullen continually sees the words “Who Killed Bambi?” in his journal throughout the series, the title of a song by the Sex Pistols that occasionally blares out, part of Mullen’s hallucinations. (It later becomes clear it was playing when he earlier discovers his son dead from an overdose.) He also seems to experience controversial TV host Even Green (Dan Stevens) speaking directly at him through the screen, Green becoming a central figure in the emerging conspiracy.

(L to R) Robert De Niro as George Mullen and Angela Bassett as President Mitchell in Episode 101 of Zero Day. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024

As he deals with these mental intrusions, he stoically threads his way through the machinations of Caplan’s Alexandra, his altruistic daughter, also a congresswoman, Modine’s crafty, ambitious formidable Speaker of the House, and long- serving aide Plemons’s Roger Carlson, whose allegiance is mysteriously compromised. There’s also his wife Sheila, sensible and rather formidable, a candidate for a judgeship, who weighs in, and his former chief-of-staff Connie Britton’s Valerie Whitesell, who joins him again, carrying her own secrets. To say nothing of the nefarious activities of Gaby Hoffman’s Monica Kidder, the ruthless tech billionaire working closely with the US government.

There’s a lot to unpack though under Glatter’s skilful direction the story glides us from one portion of the plot to the next imperceptibly. While never entirely logical dramatically or even explicable at times, its focus on questions of moral choices, national loyalty, the greater good, and the way ethically dubious, even criminal, activities are sanctioned in the name of security, is scarily pertinent.

De Niro is stoically centred as Mullen. “I was just pulling from my own feelings about those things,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “And what would seem to me would be right on both sides from either character, either side, whether they’re on my side of the aisle or the other side of the aisle. I just felt it had to be more about an honesty between people in order to get anything done.”

It is utterly absorbing to watch him work, Glatter catching his emotional journey through most of the events often in close-up – there are oddly disconcerting close-ups of his spectacles that force you to guess at Mullen’s feelings. At times he’s strangely impassive, at others just containing that sense of dismay as events unfold so catastrophically around him.

Sets and costumes fade away and we lose ourselves in the landscape of De Niro’s face, exploring every nuance of expression, searching for emotion in the depths behind the eyes. “It’s important not to indicate,” he once said. “People don’t try to show their feelings; they try to hide them.” And that’s what he does here, his control as an actor awesome.

The punchy series deals with America’s fractured media landscape in this era full of conspiracy theories, and probes the relationship between big money, technology and democracy. There are some compelling, grandiose themes and they don’t always cohere all that consistently, but it’s a drama that grabs you by the throat from the start and hurtles towards a surprising conclusion.

It’s a political mystery cloaked in shifting ambiguities and cynical manipulation, and, while often wholly preposterous, as these kinds of stories so often are, it’s wonderfully entertaining

Zero Day, streaming on Netflix.