Zero Day (American TV series)

American television miniseries

5 min read

Zero Day is an American political thriller television miniseries created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, and Michael Schmidt for Netflix, directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, and featuring an ensemble cast led by Robert De Niro. It is about a former president investigating a devastating zero-day cyberattack in the US. The series was released on Netflix on February 20, 2025, and received mixed reviews from critics.

Synopsis

A former President of the United States is given vast powers by his successor to investigate an unprecedented cyberterrorist attack on the United States that resulted in thousands of deaths.

Cast

Main

Robert De Niro as George Mullen, a popular former President, former prosecutor, and Vietnam War veteran appointed as chairman of a special commission established to identify the perpetrators behind a deadly act of cyberterrorism known as "Zero Day"
Lizzy Caplan as Alexandra Mullen, the Congressional representative from New York's 10th District and estranged daughter of George and Sheila Mullen, who is tapped to monitor her father as a ranking member of the Zero Day Commission Oversight Committee
Jesse Plemons as Roger Carlson, an experienced but troubled political operative working as a personal aide to the President of the United States ("body man") for Mullen
Joan Allen as Sheila Mullen, former First Lady who is currently nominated for a judgeship on the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals
Connie Britton as Valerie Whitesell, the Zero Day Commission chief of staff who served as White House Chief of Staff in Mullen's administration
Bill Camp as Jeremy Lasch, the Director of the CIA
Dan Stevens as Evan Green, a popular and radical political commentator and host of The Evan Green Show, who becomes Mullen's most outspoken critic
Matthew Modine as Richard Dreyer, the current Speaker of the House and a United States Representative from Ohio
Angela Bassett as President Evelyn Mitchell who appoints Mullen as head of the Zero Day Commission
McKinley Belcher III as Carl Otieno, an Assistant United States Attorney and Zero Day Commission lead investigator

Recurring

Clark Gregg as Robert Lyndon, a Wall Street billionaire, corporate businessman and political influencer affiliated with Carlson
Gaby Hoffmann as Monica Kidder, a Silicon Valley tech mogul and CEO of Panoply, subject of an anti-trust investigation
Mark Ivanir as Natan, a former Mossad operative who provides intelligence to Mullen
Mozhan Marnò as Melissa Kornblau, the Communications Director and head of public relations for the Zero Day Commission
Hannah Gross as Anna Sindler, a writer hired by Mullen to help write his memoirs
Cuyle Carvin as Special Agent Tom McCarthy, the supervisor of Mullen's Secret Service detail
Eden Lee as Special Agent Angela Kim, head of the FBI National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force
Ryan Spahn as Blake 'Leon' Felton, a member of The Reapers, a radical left wing terrorist organisation
Colin Donnell as Erik Hayes

Episodes

Production

It was reported in November 2022 that Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, and Michael Schmidt had conceived of the story, with Newman and Oppenheim writing the pilot script. With Robert De Niro attached to star, he would also serve as executive producer alongside Newman, Oppenheim, Jonathan Glickman of Panoramic Media, and Schmidt. The project was confirmed as greenlit by Netflix on March 1, 2023. Lesli Linka Glatter would direct. In April 2023, Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons, Joan Allen, and Connie Britton were announced to have joined the cast. In December 2023, Bill Camp, Matthew Modine, Dan Stevens, McKinley Belcher III, Gaby Hoffmann, Mark Ivanir and Clark Gregg joined the cast. In February 2024, Mozhan Navabi joined the cast.

An application for filming a train crash was submitted in Westchester County, New York for July 2023. Filming had started in and around New York but production was suspended with crew and cast sent home in June 2023 due to the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike. Production resumed by that December. The series was released on February 20, 2025.

Reception

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 54% approval rating based on 81 critic reviews. The website's critics consensus reads, "Zero Day has plenty of gravitas thanks to its all-star cast led by Robert De Niro, but this high-concept series' plotting is a little too goofy for it to take itself so seriously." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 52 out of 100 based on 39 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.

Lucy Mangan of The Guardian described Zero Day as "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." The Hollywood Reporter described the series in an unflattering review as a "The New York Times opinion section brought to life in its barely left-tilting centrism." "Tech oligarchs, the gerontocracy, podcasters spouting misinformation and the erosion of civil liberties all blur into a muddy soup that's adjacent to relevancy without ever achieving it", according to a review in Variety.

In a generally favorable review in the New York Times called the series "a contemporary update of a '70s-style political drama that is even more contemporary than anticipated" and is compared with paranoia infused films of that era including The Conversation (1974), Chinatown (1974), The Parallax View (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). Although the review describes some aspects of the plot as "comically tangled", it concludes that the "filmmaking itself is more grounded" and that the ending contains a "sliver of hope".

Viewership

According to data from Showlabs, Zero Day ranked second on Netflix in the United States for two consecutive weeks, covering 17–23 February and 24 February – 2 March 2025.