“It’s amazing how powerful these tech types have become,” Sheila says.

“Yeah, well, I’d have imagined she’d bee too smart to take this kind of gamble,” George replies.

The idea here is that even the richest, most powerful people can bring about their own downfall when they fly too close to the sun. Fingers crossed.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Zero Day for Decider.

Speaking of billionaires, George refuses to kowtow to one as well. (Granted, he then starts torturing people, but pobody’s nerfect.) When Monica Kidder, who’s been turning her monopolistic tech company’s algorithms against Mullen and the investigation, is granted an audience, it quickly turns nasty, and Mullen has no interest in dancing to her tune. He corrects her garbled Ben Franklin quote about trading freedom for security — billionaires adore mangling the wisdom of the ages when they’re not just quoting made-up email-forward bullshit in wisdom’s guide — by saying “‘Freedom’ is what allows people like you to do whatever you want. ‘Liberty’ is what protects the rest of us from people like you.” If Zero Day can grasp this concept even a little bit, there’s hope for the rest of us yet.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Zero Day for Decider.

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.

Are we meant to sympathize with George Mullen? This is largely a rhetorical question, as the answer is obviously yes, or else you don’t ask legendary actor Robert De Niro to play the character as America’s Grandpa. But it’s not entirely a rhetorical question. It’s one thing to sympathize with the man’s plight: his mission to uncover the parties responsible for a devastating cyberattack, his need to navigate the political rat’s nest he’d previously extracted himself from, and his fight against the slow, insidious development of senile dementia. It’s quite another thing to sympathize with how he’s dealing with all of it: pressing on blindly in one of the most-high stakes jobs in the history of (fictional) America, knowing full well his aging brain can no longer hack it. Gosh, if only we had one or two recent real-life examples of what a bad idea this is. 

I reviewed the second episode of Zero Day for Decider.

The plot of Zero Day reads like a laundry list of phenomena the real world has rendered totally moot. Transportation crashes due to the rapid shutdown of vital infrastructure? Our government is doing that itself, right out in the open. A president suffering from obvious cognitive decline? The most recent guy had that, and he lost to another guy who also has that. (Reagan had it forty years ago.) Rogue, Russian-aligned actors seizing control of the nation’s digital nerve system? I hope Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegstreth get to the bottom of this when they’re not exchanging greeting cards with Vladimir Putin. A massive, unconstitutional civil-liberties power grab that could see people being disappeared off the streets without a warrant? That’s just your tax dollars and our pals at ICE at work. Lizzy Caplan wondering if neo-Nazis had somehow learned to use computers? I give you DOGE. Lunatics shrieking at the government about conspiracies and crisis actors? The day I’m writing this, the Senate voted to confirm, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, a man who has claimed covid was bioengineered to spare Jews. And so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and on and on and on, and, and, you get it, we all get it, it’s great.

I’m covering the Robert De Niro political thriller Zero Day for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere.