“TV shows don’t get much more timely than ‘Zero Day’,” said Sophie Butcher in Empire.
The political thriller follows “much admired” former president George Mullen (Robert De Niro) who is brought out of retirement to find the culprits behind a massive cyberattack. The hackers cut power supplies across the US for an entire minute, causing chaos. “Cars crash, planes fall, hospital equipment fails.” And as people reel from this “attack on an unprecedented scale”, an “ominous” message appears on the screen of every smartphone – “This will happen again.”
Co-written by Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times journalist Michael Schmidt, the series is “packed with twists”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. Although the show was completed before Trump’s second term, his “rippling, destabilising effect on society” can be felt throughout. You won’t need to “engage your brain too much” but it’s an “astonishing amount of fun”.
If anyone is going to “muscle their way” into the “pantheon of great screen presidents” it’s De Niro, said Tim Glanfield in The Times. In his first starring role on the small screen, the Hollywood star is a “complex hero” managing to “look as if he carries the weight of the world on his shoulders while remaining calm and statesmanlike”.
It’s hard work creating a show that feels “fresh” in the “crowded conspiracy thriller market”, but “Zero Day” pulls it off, merging the “addictive” quality of traditional network TV with the “glossy” look and feel of a Netflix show.
“Stylish and fleet as any feature thriller”, with “blockbuster production values”, it’s a “well-built” show that “smartly deploys its big-name actors”, said Judy Berman in Time. However its “evasion of the substance of contemporary American polarisation” and “extreme efforts to avoid offence” feel, at times, like a “betrayal of its plainspoken hero”.
Everything feels “painfully current”, but the show suffers from a “lousy script”, and Angela Bassett (who plays the current president) delivers her lines in an “embarrassingly hammy fashion”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph.
At times, the pacing “does sometimes feel off”, added Tamara Davison in London’s Evening Standard, and the plot is “a little slow” until the third episode. “Could this show have worked as a two-hour feature film? That’s entirely possible, especially with De Niro at the helm.”
Yes, it “loses tension” around the halfway mark, said Empire, but “once the truth starts unravelling, the show kicks back up a notch, and the last two instalments are truly nail-biting”.