1 day ago
5
There’s an awful lot of fun television around at the moment. I can only assume it is an equal and opposite reaction to, well, everything going on in the real world – and I’m very grateful for Prime Target, Paradise, High Potential, the forthcoming new series of Reacher and various other vital antidepressant contributions to life.
But I think we can agree that there is always room for another serotonin-boosting entry into the viewing schedules. Enter Zero Day. It’s as fine a piece of hokum as you could wish to see – not least as it stars an on-form Robert De Niro in his first big small-screen outing.
He has, I feel, let contempt – either for the roles or for the profession as a whole – seep into a few of his later film performances. This, I worried, could have seen the actor dabbling in something he might have considered an even lesser art form. But here, De Niro is committed and playing a straight bat as George Mullen: a much-respected former US president dragged out of retirement to calm a panicked populace after a terrorist cyber-attack.
But why? But who? But how? An important part of preposterous fun is knowing that all the answers will be given in full by the end of the run – in this case, six hour-long episodes – and nobody’s going to ask you to engage your brain too much along the way. So, it looks first as if it must have been the Russians. But then there is news of a hacktivist group in New York that was showing every sign of preparing a massive comms strike. Clues from CCTV cameras join nuggets of information from the shadowy contacts gathered by Mullen during his days as commander in chief. It’s a tale packed with twists from creators Eric Newman (executive producer on American Primeval, Griselda and Painkiller), Noah Oppenheim and the Pulitzer-winning journalist and author Michael Schmidt.
As Mullen visits the scenes of accidents caused by a one-minute electronic blackout, he is assailed by voices from the crowd. They claim that the whole thing has been orchestrated by the government, or as an insurance scam, and that crisis actors are playing the dead and injured. Finally, he has to stop and deliver an impromptu speech about the true meaning of America, of patriotism and the real source of conspiracy theorising: “You’re afraid. You think if you get worked up over some bullshit nonsense that won’t make you afraid … of someone who hates us and everything that makes us who we are!” Shakespeare, it is not. Deeply satisfying in the unthinking moment before the next helping of plot arrives, it is.
Added to this is Mullen’s appointment as the head of a commission put together to find the attackers and granted near-unlimited (and possibly unconstitutional) powers to do so. This puts him at further odds with his liberal daughter, Alex (Lizzy Caplan), who works for the Democrats and is then put in charge of the committee overseeing the commission. There is also a president (Angela Bassett) under pressure to get results quickly, and not necessarily correctly, Jesse Plemons as Mullen’s increasingly shady righthand man Roger Carlson, plus chief of staff Valerie Whitesell (Connie Britton), who has a history that may have veered beyond the professional with Mullen, but who his pragmatic wife, Sheila (Joan Allen), insists is brought back to protect him.
There’s more. We meet a group of hedge funders who may or may not have something to do with things (they do, I bet). A rightwing blowhard stirring up Info Wars-type animus against an unspecified “Them” (and Mullen specifically). And, of course, the ever present threat of another attack. There is also an additional layer of doubt cast across Mullen’s mental – rather than moral – integrity, as the possibility of early stage dementia comes into play. Or is it a case of: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you”?
Zero Day was completed before the second Trump presidency, but there’s no doubt that he and his rippling, destabilising effect on society, on the media, on the definition and handling of truth, and on the principles of democracy are the fuel that keeps this storytelling engine running. But it remains first and foremost an astonishing amount of fun – firmly grounded by De Niro and his portrait of a good man struggling to do the right thing in a world that offers corruption at worst, and only compromise at best.
