As the episode progresses, it becomes clear that neither George nor anyone else on the show fits on a political spectrum we’d recognize as existing at any point during this sad American century. Pop quiz: To what political party does George belong? Is his daughter, Alex, in the opposition party? What about her apparent boss, Speaker Dreyer? President Mitchell? Shrieking news influencer Evan Green? Shady, possibly pedophilic billionaire Bob Lyndon? Zero Day may know, but it isn’t telling.
But okay, forget party entirely: To what political wing do any of them even belong? Dreyer is clearly a right-wing type, but he’s passionately demagoguing about the violation of leftists’ civil liberties. Alex comes across like an AOC in terms of affect, but she’s working directly for Dreyer while attempting to hamstring her Biden-coded dad. Green looks and sounds right at home on the Ben Shapiro/Matt Walsh spectrum, but he refers to the left-wing Reapers as hard-working Americans whose rights should be defended and defends a mother whose child has been taken from her by government thugs. He also really hates billionaire Bob, while billionaire Bob thinks war with Russia would be good for business. Mitchell’s politics are completely opaque; all we really know is she’d prefer picking a fight with a nuclear superpower to rounding up a few dozen Discord users. All of these people seem to hate each other on ideological grounds, but we’re never really even told what those ideologies are.
Again, there have been many, many political thrillers the politics of which consist solely of “corruption and authoritarianism are bad,” and since until recently this has been the bipartisan consensus there has historically been little need to go beyond that. But at a certain point, a refusal to depict politics as it exists when you’re telling a story about presidents and congresspeople and civil liberties violations and so on obscures more than it reveals, even simply as entertainment. That lack of politics isn’t apolitical at all: it’s a politics of cowardice, or worse, appeasement.
I reviewed the third episode of Zero Day for Decider.
Tags: decider, TV, TV reviews, zero day