TV: Zero Day (2025)

Robert De Niro stars as an ex-president on the hunt for cyber terrorists

De Niro’s former president talks crisis strategy with Angela Bassett’s Commander in Chief

TV: Zero Day (2025)

Streaming on Netflix, six episodes

Robert De Niro has never starred in a streaming television series. Now, at age 81, he’s chosen a demanding, multi-faceted role to dive into, and I’d suggest he’s done it with intent.

I can imagine him thinking a couple of years back, when he agreed to co-produce and star in the techno thriller Zero Day, “This one’s for all of us.”

Okay, I’m leaping into De Niro’s head, and attributing to him an altruism many will snigger at, but I don’t think I’m far off base. He’s been a fierce Trump antagonist for years, so I’m willing to bet he (with many others) saw a national trauma looming and believed this script could speak to it.

Still, as the politicians say, let me be clear. Nothing here precisely replicates what the country is undergoing today. But, oh, the echoes. You’ll feel them across all six episodes.

De Niro plays popular former U.S. president George Mullen, whom we first meet in the library of his rural upstate New York manse, fumbling with a safe whose combination he can’t remember. His concentration is interrupted by jarring memories of his lost son, who took his own life while Mullen was in office.

He’s also flashing on a journal he maintains filled with cryptic entries even he no longer quite understands. The journal is in the safe. And the ex-president’s mental jitters will haunt him until the end of this tangled story. Meanwhile, his security detail is pounding on the library door, yelling for their boss to open up.

Mullen’s anxiety becomes clear when we flash back to three days before. That’s when the whole country experienced a national power outage – of phones, air traffic control, home, office and hospital lighting – for precisely one minute. After which screens on all devices read: THIS WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.

In that electrifying 60 seconds more than 3,000 lives are lost. In the aftermath, Roger Carlson (Jesse Plemons), a former aide and still a trusted confidante, drops by to inform Mullen that President Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett), would like Mullen to visit some first responders and lift their spirits.

His public appearance draws an angry, restive crowd, fearful that the attack is only a first strike.

Mullen urges them not to panic or grow paranoid and turn on one another. His unifying message is captured on national television.

The favorable public reaction prompts President Mitchell to summon Mullen to the White House. Congress has funded a Zero Day Commission to get to the bottom of the attack, and she asks Mullen to lead it.

Robert De Niro (c.) leads a team of experts to find the source of a virulent cyber attack

In agreeing, the do-gooder is picking up a loaded weapon. Mitchell carefully explains to Mullen that the commission is authorized to conduct warrantless searches and seizures, suspend habeas corpus and, if need be, use “enhanced interrogation” – torture – in grilling suspects.

No party designations are assigned to any of the political players here, and Mullen comes across as a “moderate” institutionalist who could be leaning left or right. That fuzziness in the script is deliberate.

But as we learn more about the depth of the terrorist cyber-attack, we see Mullen’s principles not just tested but – for the common good, he tells himself – abandoned.

He and his highly experienced legal and technical staff cross all of those boundaries. Their hasty in the moment rationale is that in acting for the good of the country, norms must be bent. There’s no time to waste.

Does that rationale resonate with recent real-life headlines? Look, I’m not suggesting that our current political frenzy is foretold here. In fact, the political landscape is depicted with features we can recognize but not neatly plug into today’s tensions.

Mullen’s daughter Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan) is a member of the House in her father’s party, but she thinks he’s a feckless gradualist who doesn’t understand the country’s cry for simple, effective social and economic policies.

She’s allied with Speaker of the House Richard Dreyer (Matthew Modine), also of Mullen and Mitchell’s party, who questions Mullen’s bleeding-heart instincts while harboring presidential ambitions of his own.

Also taunting Mullen is virulent hater and TV talk show host Evan Green (Dan Stevens), a role written so that I couldn’t tell whether Green’s on-air rants were attacking Mullen from the right or the left.

That confusion, of course, makes its own point. A country unmoored from shared values is open to a wild range of views. No matter what “beliefs” Green spouts, he’s cynically exploiting the cyber-attack to boost ratings, and he’s got financial interests in the economic uncertainty his avid viewers have no clue about.

Towering above it all is De Niro, a Lion on the prowl in one of the best performances I’ve seen him give. An outspoken leftist in real life, the actor here is fastidiously undogmatic, never seeming to troll Trump or America’s current rightward turning.

De Niro seems to be working just above both Mullen’s and the country’s thrashing. The sadness of a country at war with itself that he weaves into Mullen’s toughest decisions stayed with me.

Nobody’s hands are clean. We learn that CIA Director Lasch (Bill Camp, creepily good) knows something about the attackers Mullen can’t even guess. The mental confusion the ex-president is experiencing could be brought on by manipulative software aimed directly at the former president’s eyes, hence at his brain.

The malware was concocted by, and has been stolen from, the CIA. It looks like the terrorists have it, and they could be mind-bending Mullen even as he conducts his investigation.

There are more twists, not all of which I could follow. Some machinations bordered on the far-fetched, and I wasn’t always sure how each piece – the manipulation of the stock market by a Musk-like billionaire went over my head – fit in the scheme.

But the series has a stateliness, a decidedly idealistic gravitas, that I found not just refreshing but compelling.

Obviously this clearcut good-versus-evil doesn’t represent the parameters our country is operating within today.

America has never been perfect, but here the principal scriptwriters, Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim and Michael Schmidt, are unabashedly summoning a sturdier body politic than we’ve managed to fashion post-9/11 or can claim to have now in the era of Trump.

I liked the visual sobriety of Zero Day, its solemn tone and quiet summoning of old-fashioned honor. How quaint that word seems to have become. Accordingly, this series is paced to feel urgent, even momentous, and at the same it’s unafraid to show us a tattered national fabric more frayed than we realize.

The performances range from quietly competent to (nervously, shakily) inspired. I especially enjoyed Camp’s deeply cynical CIA honcho. I was also taken with Bassett’s Commander in Chief. She struck just the right balance between tremulous and steely, with the fate of a nation in her hands.

De Niro summons a tight, uneasy gravitas as a man committed to protecting his country

Towering above it all is De Niro, a Lion on the prowl in one of the best performances I’ve seen him give. An outspoken leftist in real life, the actor here is fastidiously undogmatic, never seeming to troll Trump or America’s current rightward turning.

Mullen’s personal life contains missteps, and he’s not always a truthful husband or father. Joan Allen does a strong, subtle job as his wife, a lawyer up for a federal judgeship who faces down Senate inquisitors with cool tenacity.

The script gets all that in. But De Niro seems to be working just above both Mullen’s and the country’s thrashing. It’s no spoiler to report that the malicious cyber plot comes from within. And the sadness of a country at war with itself that De Niro weaves into Mullen’s toughest decisions stayed with me.

The series’ storytelling isn’t always tidy, but its quixotic plea for sanity pulls it into a realm – wondering who’s actually looking after the overall public good – that TV and movies rarely venture into these days.

I think it’s welcome. It is good and it does good. I’ll take it.