< In 'Zero Day,' a stellar cast struggles through a silly story

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LINDA HOLMES: The Netflix series Zero Day begins with a terrifying moment in which everything in the United States goes briefly offline-- power, internet, banking systems, transportation systems, everything. Thousands of people die, and even after everything is restored, a widespread panic leads to a government investigation of who did it. With a cast headed by Robert De Niro and Angela Bassett, the show hopes to be a paranoid political thriller for our times. I'm Linda Holmes, and today we're talking about Zero Day on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

HOLMES: Joining me today is NPR's TV critic, Eric Deggans. Hello, Eric. I'm so glad I have you here to go over this with me.

ERIC DEGGANS: [CHUCKLES] I know, I know. It's super complicated, but hopefully, we'll figure it out together.

HOLMES: Yeah, we'll figure it out together. We'll figure it out. So in Zero Day, Robert De Niro plays beloved former President George Mullen. He's appointed the head of the Zero Day Commission after a deadly cyberattack, and he must find out who did it and prevent it from happening again.

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ROBERT DE NIRO: I do not render judgment on the extent of the powers I have been granted. They are unprecedented, as is this danger. But I do offer you my solemn vow. We will only employ them insofar as they are absolutely necessary.

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HOLMES: Also in the cast, which is large and impressive, Angela Bassett as the current president; Lizzy Caplan as George's daughter, who's also a member of Congress; Jesse Plemons as George's longtime right-hand man; Connie Britton as George's aide and former paramour; Joan Allen as his faithful wife; Matthew Modine as the Speaker of the House, and Gaby Hoffmann as a shadowy tech mogul. What they're going for here is a political thriller where you're not sure who to trust out of all these people. Zero Day is streaming now on Netflix. Eric, I think you, like I, come into a political thriller thinking, I want this to work for me. How did this work for you?

DEGGANS: Eh, I have to say, I didn't like it as much as I wanted to. And there were elements of it that I really did like. There were parts of the story that I thought were interesting. I'm a sucker for political thrillers, so I was really hoping to see more, I guess, political thriller. [LAUGHS]

HOLMES: Yeah.

DEGGANS: And I was intrigued by the idea of centering the whole story on Robert De Niro's character, who's a retired president, is an older character than we see in a lot of these thrillers, and, you know, most of his challenges are mental, you know? He's having problems with, perhaps, his cognition. And it's hard to tell if he has access to something that is communicating to him special information on what is actually happening here, or whether he's slowly losing his mind.

HOLMES: I guess I would call it a flirtation with mind control?

DEGGANS: Yes.

HOLMES: Similar to kind of what you see in Winter Soldier and that strand of the Marvel movies of, like, is someone controlling him remotely with triggering of some kind? But my sense is, like, they don't really decide what they want to do about that. So you get this, like, is it mind control? Is it dementia? Is it just that he--

DEGGANS: Was under some serious stress. [LAUGHS]

HOLMES: Yeah. And they don't seem to want to decide about that.

DEGGANS: You always wonder if some of this is the result of our current streaming universe, where when people write these things, they have no idea whether there'll be another one.

HOLMES: Yeah.

DEGGANS: You know, maybe that's their way of leaving the door open. If we leave the door open with some questions about what happened to George Mullen, maybe there's a way to keep the story going.

HOLMES: Mm-hmm.

DEGGANS: That's what I was wondering every time I ran into a situation where they didn't resolve things. And there are several situations here where they don't resolve things.

HOLMES: Yeah. You know, I have seen things on television that I liked less than this, but not in a while.

DEGGANS: So this is where Linda is less nice than Eric. [LAUGHS]

HOLMES: I really thought this was very bad. And I thought it was bad in two primary ways, one of which is, I don't know that you can make a political thriller that is about political acts like signing laws, holding commissions, making reports, and be as resolute as these people are about never suggesting what the substantive politics of any of these people are.

DEGGANS: Yeah.

HOLMES: It's not just that they don't say who's a Republican and who's a Democrat. They don't really give anybody any substantive politics about anything other than, we all want the country and solve Zero Day. It is not that I need it to be a partisan piece. That's not what I'm saying. But it is so phony to me because they are so carefully going around and making sure that nobody can ever be identified with any particular political position, that it all feels incredibly fake. And that includes-- you know, one of the people that I didn't mention in the intro is Dan Stevens, who plays what I would call a "wing podcaster." You cannot really tell whether he is a left-wing podcaster or a right-wing podcaster. He is just a wing.

DEGGANS: He seems pretty much in the Alex Jones, Glenn Beck kind of--

HOLMES: I don't know, man. I think they want you not to know. And so--

DEGGANS: Well, they're not explicitly identifying what party he aligns with, but everything about visually about how they present him--

HOLMES: I agree with you, but I think there are places where they try to make it possible that he's kind of a left-wing guy who just operates with similar signifiers. My point is, this is what I mean when I say it all gets very labored to me--

DEGGANS: Yeah.

HOLMES: --because they're trying so hard to avoid any actual political relevance.

DEGGANS: I have to say, that was the one thing that always brought me up short, when I would watch The West Wing, is that--

HOLMES: Mm-hmm.

DEGGANS: --you know, the partisanship that we are struggling with now was starting to emerge when that show was on the air. And The West Wing existed in a world where that partisanship was not distorting politics, even to the extent that it was doing it in that moment. And so there were a lot of times when they had political crises that they would resolve that would never happen in real life and felt like a fairy tale.

HOLMES: Right.

DEGGANS: And I was just going to say, we're seeing that here to the nth degree.

HOLMES: That's what I mean. I think you're absolutely right. And it's like, this is that, but more. More, more, more. However, yes, I have these issues with the way it handles politics. I also just think it's a bad show. You get through the first episode, which is pretty decent as a thriller opening, where they set up this terrible situation, and they-- the guy's got to sort of answer the call from retirement and all that stuff. And then I think you don't really need to watch any of it until about the fifth episode.

DEGGANS: That's what I was going to say. It starts interesting, and the ending was interesting. The middle part-- [LAUGHS]

HOLMES: I think the ending-- I didn't like the ending. I think the ending is very, very, very silly. And the resolution of what was the motivation for this attack is absurd. However, at least stuff starts to happen. And the entire middle part, maybe episodes two through four-ish, are really just a series, I think, of red herrings and a bunch of stuff that's not going to be important, including that entire Dan Stevens thing, which is not really necessary. You don't need it. You could have made this whole thing a movie, I think, and probably retained most of what is potentially fun about it. I do want to ask you about this cast.

DEGGANS: Yeah.

HOLMES: How did you feel about the way they used this cast?

DEGGANS: Well, you know, Angela Bassett is playing the president.

HOLMES: Mm-hmm.

DEGGANS: She doesn't get to do much, [LAUGHS] except occasionally say stern things to Robert De Niro.

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ANGELA BASSETT: We have no clue here and no time to spare. We need an entity with all the powers of every law enforcement and Intelligence Agency put together, operating on American soil.

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HOLMES: Well, she has, like, imported Angela Bassett authority--

DEGGANS: Right, right.

HOLMES: --that she brings to that part.

DEGGANS: I think if anybody other than Robert De Niro were starring in this show, there's no way she would have played that part.

HOLMES: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

DEGGANS: They would have had to get somebody who's not as famous and not as accomplished.

HOLMES: Yeah.

DEGGANS: Jesse Plemons, we got then Jesse Plemons, which is, you know-- he looks great in this role. But I think what you were talking about, in terms of the pacing of the show, is also what I, you know, have come to call streamer-itis.

HOLMES: Yeah.

DEGGANS: It is hard for people who are greenlighting these shows for streamers to figure out how to pace series sometimes. And you'll be watching one, and you'll get the sense, man, they could have told this in three episodes or four episodes. You know, why is it eight?

HOLMES: Yeah.

DEGGANS: Or why is it seven? Or whatever. And, you know, I definitely had that sense with this one, is that they felt like there was a lot of stuff in there sort of designed to stretch out the story and keep people engaged over multiple episodes when they could have done this-- you know, it would have been nice to see them do it in maybe three episodes. I wouldn't say that it was, you know, tight enough to be a movie.

HOLMES: Right.

DEGGANS: And I'll also push back just a little bit and say, if you remember what the country was like in the wake of 9/11--

HOLMES: I do get that, and I do think that's fair.

DEGGANS: --we were in a very different time. And I think-- just to fill in the holes a little bit, so Robert De Niro's character is a retired president who is still very beloved and has a lot of credibility with the American people. This awful cyberattack happens, and everyone's concerned that it can happen again. So they form a commission to try and get to the bottom of what happened. And they are given extraordinary investigative powers. They are allowed to imprison people without warrants, without, you know, any kind of due process, really, and press suspects until they get whatever information they want out of them.

HOLMES: Using torture.

DEGGANS: And I think they try to justify that by positing that the nation is in the same place that it was in the wake of 9/11, where people were willing to sign off, you know, on something like the Patriot Act.

HOLMES: I think you're right that there's something here that could feel effective. It's just I think the show is very reluctant to have a point of view, and I don't necessarily mean a political, partisan point of view. I just mean, like, does Mullen have a point of view about these things? Because I think there are times when he seems to want to take advantage of these extraordinary powers. And then there are times when they suggest maybe he's taking advantage of these extraordinary powers because he's being mind-controlled. And to me, that's, like, rather relevant to how I feel about the character. And to kind of chicken out of saying, like, yes or no to, is it part of his makeup that he wanted to do this to people and have these powers and flex these powers? Or was it because of mind control? Like, to me, you can't kind of-- like, maybe. Who can say? Like, you can say. You wrote the show.

DEGGANS: And another option is just that he was being-- in some way, either it was happening to him naturally, or it was being induced to him--

HOLMES: Sure.

DEGGANS: --from outside, that he was undergoing some sort of deterioration, leading him to make choices that he wouldn't normally make.

HOLMES: Right. And there's a moment where his wife, played by Joan Allen, who also, I think, gets not nearly enough to do here--

DEGGANS: Ugh.

HOLMES: --they're talking about, like, the potential for his mind to be affected by different things-- medication, maybe it's Mike or whatever. And she says something about "makes you feel like you want to be a fascist."

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SPEAKER 1: It causes memory loss, temporary confusion.

JOAN ALLEN: How about a sudden affinity for fascism? Is that on the list?

SPEAKER 2: Wait, that's what this is about?

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HOLMES: You can't just, like, throw that out and then kind of never deal again with the fact that his wife feels this way about what he's doing. I do think that I held this to a higher standard because this is the kind of thing I like. I like political thrillers. I think with a thriller, you got to provide some resolution. There are a bunch of different things that they kind of throw out there and they don't do a lot with. And I thought, well, why is this even here?

DEGGANS: The other thing is, with a show like this, because there's so much A-level talent in it, they all have to have something to do.

HOLMES: Yeah.

DEGGANS: And one reason why, you know, Dan Stevens' part was probably as big as it was is because Dan Stevens was playing that character.

HOLMES: Yeah.

DEGGANS: Right? [LAUGHS] And so you have to give him some stuff to do, or he's not going to want to do this show.

HOLMES: Mm-hmm.

DEGGANS: So he got a lot of stuff to do that, ultimately, didn't matter very much to the main storyline. And who knows? Maybe there was some version of this where all that stuff he went through was much more integral. Who knows? But I do think that when you have Angela Bassett and Jesse Plemons and Connie Britton and Bill Camp and Dan Stevens and Gaby Hoffmann and Clark Gregg, when you've got all those people that you have to service, there's no way you can give them all great scenes and do that in three or four episodes. So I think there's a lot show-bizzy, behind-the-scenes reasons.

HOLMES: I was going to say, Eric is always bringing the show-business reality to bum me out about why I can't have what I want.

DEGGANS: Because I spend so much time talking to these people, and--

HOLMES: I know you do.

DEGGANS: And I have a lot of friends who are writers, who worked in broadcast and now are pitching to streamers. And what they constantly tell me is that the streaming services, the people in charge, don't necessarily have a great grasp of how to make television. And they are constantly pushing them to delay payoff moments in episodes, from the first episode back to maybe the third or fourth episode, because their main goal is to get people to watch as many in one sitting as possible. And the result for the viewer is that you're watching episodes where nothing of real import happens.

HOLMES: Yeah.

DEGGANS: And you're constantly wondering, should I be paying attention to that? I mean, especially in a thriller, you're paying attention to every little note because you don't know which detail is actually going to mean something in the end.

HOLMES: You want everything to matter. That's the satisfaction, is you want everything at the end to go chick, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick and kind of fall into place together.

DEGGANS: Exactly. And so when there's padding and you're paying attention to a bunch of things that ultimately don't matter, you get towards the end of the season run, and you start to feel like you wasted your time as a viewer. And I think that is a big problem for Zero Day.

HOLMES: You know, neither one of us big fan of Zero Day, but Robert De Niro remains Robert De Niro. We want to know what you think about Zero Day. Find us at facebook.com/pchh. That brings us to the end of our show. Eric Deggans, thank you so much for being here. It is always a pleasure.

DEGGANS: Oh, thank you so much. And, you know, watch Day of the Jackal on Peacock. That's a much better thriller. [LAUGHS]

HOLMES: There you go. There you go. This episode is produced by Hafsa Fathima and Liz Metzger and edited by Mike Katzif. Our supervising producer is Jessica Reedy. Hello Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes, and we'll see you all tomorrow.

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