A great political drama is more important than jewels, the Good Book says. Or it may, anyhow, given that poor ones, like the weak, will always be with us. Who now would remain freely through 2006’s The Sentinel, in which a there-for-the-paycheck Michael Douglas undertakes a steamless encounter with first female Kim Basinger? Or Charlie Sheen’s blindingly awful Shadow Conspiracy ( 1997 ), mocked by the Washington Post for channeling” a greasy, tubby George Stephanopoulos”?
Yet well-received efforts in the style is age like crab meat in a sealed car. Rod Lurie’s The Contender was one of the best films of 2000 but feels then like a Lewinski-era time capsule, but dated are its physical beliefs. To watch House of Cards is to be appalled that we ever liked it in the first position. If, as the French nationalist Joseph de Maistre reportedly remarked, “every society gets the state it deserves”, the same is plainly misleading of government-themed pleasure. Politics just move very fast for any but the most experienced display performers to keep up. For every vital All the President’s Men, we get a few Manchurian Candidate remakes collapsing under the weight of their own indifference.  ,
The answer is definitely not a loss of cast ambition. In addition to leading gentleman Robert De Niro, Zero Day features traditional film actors Joan Allen and Angela Bassett, as well as for small-screen friends as Jesse Plemons, Connie Britton, Lizzy Caplan, and Dan Stevens. If my back-of-the-envelope math is correct, the ensemble has three dozen Academy Award and Emmy nominations to its name, to say nothing of the plaudits won by Lesli Linka Glatter ( Mad Men, Homeland ), who directed all six episodes.  ,
The problem, visible almost from the stop, is that no one on display is very good in this generation. No De Niro, who delivers one of the most perfunctory appearances of his job. No Plemons, usually exemplary but jumpy and mannered below. Not yet Caplan, whose one-note representation of a pugnacious lawmaker is enough to make one yearn for the complexities and personal shadows of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  ,
Nor is Zero Day‘s narrative any help. The system tells the story of a laptop exploit that causes widespread dying and carnage, setting America on war footing and prompting the creation of an authoritarian investigatory body. Run by former president George Mullen ( De Niro ), the so-called Zero Day Commission must find the parties responsible without abusing its extraconstitutional powers. Rather than exploring this tension, however, Zero Day exploits it, trading nuanced storytelling for increasingly poisonous “reveals”. Why plumb the irreconcilable demands of liberty and safety when one can make a paint-by-numbers melodrama in which every player is a grifter, traitor, or fool?
Such pessimism might have been darkly compelling had it been presented coherently. Sadly, Netflix’s production throws out the baby of rational screenwriting with the bathwater of partisan signifiers. Take, for instance, Stevens’s role as a Tucker Carlson-inspired cable news firebrand. A racist and a reactionary, Stevens’s character hawks MAGA-coded “merch” even as his supporters denounce Mullen as” Deep-State George”. Yet the TV host is also a friend of leftist radicals and an enemy of Russia. It is one thing to veil a man’s party identification in the service of dramatic art. It is another to so scramble his beliefs that no conceivable ideological movement could claim him.
And what of the concessions the show does make to its particular political moment? For all of its pretensions to timelessness, Zero Day can hardly go an episode without referencing “mental health” or” controlling the narrative”. Neither can the writers resist giving an Elon Musk stand-in the Jeffrey Epstein treatment. ( No, it isn’t suicide. ) Strangest of all, the series plays like a” Thank You Brandon” tribute to our luckless 46th president. De Niro’s Mullen is a one-term chief executive with cognitive problems and a dead son. His successor in office, a black woman ( Bassett ), is in over her head and can do nothing without her former boss’s assistance. So pronounced is the allusion that one imagines a straightforward quid pro quo between Netflix’s chiefs and Joe Biden:” Drop out of the race quietly, and we will lionize you in a star-studded, six-episode thriller” . ,
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In short, Zero Day is a travesty. Yet even its many mistakes might have added up to something workable had not its creators leaned on a dead-tired organizational trope. Like most shows that backload their narrative disclosures, Netflix’s series places its characters in a peculiar stasis, able neither to reveal their true motives nor act decisively until the final half-hour. The consequence is a show with no real surprises. We know that information is being withheld to keep us streaming. In the meantime, it doesn’t matter what choices the men and women on screen make. Nothing they do will bring a swifter resolution than Netflix desires.  ,
Is Zero Day “regime propaganda”, as the Free Press’s River Page has argued in a pointed review? I suppose it wants to be. Ultimately, though, the show is too cynical to move the needle in any direction but one. That man with the American flag on his lapel? He is my enemy.  ,
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.
