Robert De Niro in a Self-Serious Netflix Thriller

During a lull in the second half of Netflix‘s six-part political thriller Zero Day — and there are more lulls than there should be — I began to contemplate how much more efficiently the show’s central crisis could be resolved with the assistance of either Owen Hendricks, the protagonist of Netflix’s The Recruit, or Peter Sutherland, the protagonist of Netflix’s The Night Agent.

Netflix’s recent political thrillers have been rendered largely fungible by the streamer’s compact release schedule. The Diplomat is the best of this group, so I’m going to leave it out of the conversation. The Recruit is a goofy show, but it steers into its absurdities with reckless and fast-moving abandon that I appreciate. The Night Agent takes itself much more seriously, but creator Shawn Ryan has a tremendous internal editing mechanism that keeps the show lean and propulsive.

The sad truth is that while Owen Hendricks and Peter Sutherland would probably improve Zero Day significantly, neither character would fit into the lugubrious world of the show, which wastes an undeniably spectacular cast on a fundamentally silly and unrealistic story that badly wants to be taken as serious and realistic. The truth is that the cast is too good for Zero Day not to be watchable, but its self-congratulatory conviction that it’s far smarter than it actually is makes it hard to embrace on more than a speculative “What are all these people doing here?” level.

Robert De Niro plays George Mullen, former nonpartisan president of the United States. Mullen is famous as the last president able to reach across the aisle — what “aisle” that happens to be on a show that makes no reference to “Democrats” or “Republicans” is unclear — and for deciding not to run for reelection under somewhat mysterious circumstances.

Mullen has a dull post-presidential routine: He wakes up, he takes his Lipitor, he goes for a swim, he goes for a run, he reads the President’s Daily Briefing and he goes to his office and struggles to write his memoir. His wife Sheila (Joan Allen), an aspiring judge, is occasionally around. His estranged daughter Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan), a Congresswoman whose superficial resemblance to a real-life New York City politician with nearly the same name isn’t the least bit coincidental, is never around.

Then, one afternoon, the power goes off. Everywhere. Planes crash. Security systems go dark. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the United States. For one minute. Everybody in the country receives an alert reading: “THIS WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.”

The cyberattack, called “Zero Day,” kills thousands and freaks out millions, causing nonpartisan President Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett) to collaborate with the nonpartisan Speaker of the House (Matthew Modine’s Richard Dreyer) to form a nonpartisan investigative commission to make sure THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN AGAIN.

The only person America would trust enough to head the commission is Mullen, even though he gives the impression of being unable to tell “malware” from “MalcWear,” a new clothing line Malcolm Gladwell has been developing for 9,999 hours. Mullen is given almost unlimited power in conducting his investigation, throwing the Constitution out the window.

What Mitchell doesn’t know — what nobody knows — is that Mullen appears to be having some disagreements with reality, experiencing memory glitches and auditory hallucinations like constantly hearing the Sex Pistols’ “Who Killed Bambi?” for reasons that the series half-explains.

Entangled in the ensuing chaos is Mullen’s longtime aide/fixer/something Roger (Jesse Plemons), his former chief-of-staff Valerie (Connie Britton), the head of the CIA (Bill Camp), a Tucker Carlson-esque pundit (Dan Stevens), a Jeffrey Epstein-esque sketchy billionaire (Clark Gregg) and more.

The cyberattack turns out to be — SPOILER! — a conspiracy and I’m not going to tell you how far up the conspiracy goes. But let’s just say that it’s not “the bottom.”

Created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim and Michael Schmidt, Zero Day aggressively wants to have it both ways when it comes to approaching reality. Sure, practically every character has a very obvious real-world counterpart and the series is anxious to pat you on the head every time you’re able to recognize who somebody or something is supposed to represent, but the observations never go deeper than surface-level references to “Russia” or “The Patriot Act.” If you take a step or two back and attempt to spell out a thematic through-line about our current polarized political climate and technologically oversaturated society and the costs of even temporarily surrendering our freedoms, you might experience a small stroke. It’s the New York Times Opinion section brought to life in its barely left-tilting centrism.

People on both fringes, the series suggests, are tearing us apart equally and the ultra-wealthy are non-specifically evil and if you understand that, you get a cookie.

With Lesli Linka Glatter directing all six episodes, Zero Day looks good, but its pacing is consistently strange. We’re constantly getting chyrons telling us how many days it is after Zero Day as if to suggest that time is of the essence. Meanwhile characters come and go between various locations in a way that suggests matter-transferring portals more than helicopters. There’s one very good suspense sequence and snippets of accompanying tension, but overall there’s no momentum to the mystery and the lack of interesting character arcs is conspicuous.

Then again, there aren’t many characters to speak of, which brings us to the “Whose presence in this stacked cast is the least explicable?” question. Bassett has nothing at all to play, but she conveys dogged authority in her sleep. Everything interesting for Britton’s character is in her coyly presented backstory, because in the main story she has very little reason to be there. Allen has one very good scene that, if you think about it for a single second, makes no sense. Because her character is “AOC without the ideology or background” and everything from her past with her dad is treated with more of that annoying coyness, Caplan is stuck with mostly multi-directional indignation.

Effortlessly capturing the soulless hypocrisy at the heart of Tucker Carlson’s preppy, elitist background and implausible man-of-the-people posturing, Stevens is the only person in the cast whom I’d describe as “having fun,” though there isn’t a high degree of difficulty in lampooning Tucker Carlson.

Plemons, playing a multi-purpose fixer whose apparent decades of experience don’t align with his being played by a 36-year-old actor, mines a wealth of inner conflict based on snippets of dialogue. This character could have been the center of a much more complex series, but when you have Robert De Niro in your show, the show becomes The Robert De Niro Show.

And De Niro, who presumably was the draw for everybody around him in the ensemble, has his moments. There’s maybe an episode or two in which Mullen’s mental wellness is a real issue and De Niro shows his delicate psychological balance in interesting ways. The problem is that De Niro never seems to be acting with anybody, and so although Mullen has a wide variety of relationships with the different characters onscreen — husband, father, mentor, more ambiguous stuff — there’s never any variation to the chemistry. You never finish a scene thinking De Niro and any of his co-stars did anything interesting together, and in a series about a collaborative investigation, that’s a dramatic dead-end.

The actual conclusion of Zero Day is far more open-ended than you’d expect for something billed as a “limited series.” The adventures in this world could continue in the event of the show’s success — and with this much star power, success is a real possibility — but nothing in the observations about modern American life is lively enough to require continuation.

Fans of the show will smugly say that people who don’t like it fail to realize how plausible it is. First off, “Nah.” Second off, “Plausibility isn’t the same as a good story, well-told.”