The new Netflix limited series “Zero Day” has been in development for several years, but it is arriving at a time when its primary themes — regarding presidential overreach, the hacking of the federal government and the persistence of disinformation — are dominating the actual news cycle. It is a contemporary update of a ’70s-style political drama that is even more contemporary than anticipated.
Asked if the time is ripe for a resurgence of the conspiracy thriller, the executive producer Eric Newman was succinct: “We’re living in one.”
Created by Newman and two executive producers with journalism backgrounds — Noah Oppenheim, a former president of NBC News, and Michael S. Schmidt, an investigative reporter for the Washington bureau of The New York Times — “Zero Day” depicts a nightmare scenario in which the United States has been attacked and the person in charge of the response might not be of sound mind.
After a cyber-strike cripples U.S. transportation systems, leaving 3,400 dead from transit accidents and other disasters, a former president named George Mullen (Robert De Niro) is selected to lead an investigative commission. But Mullen has been having hallucinations and keeps hearing the same Sex Pistols song, “Who Killed Bambi?,” on a loop in his head. Is he cracking up? Has his brain been tampered with, à la “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962)?
Whatever the cause, Mullen is soon trampling over civil liberties and resorting to 9/11-era “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including torture, with U.S. citizens.
While “Zero Day” makes explicit reference to 9/11 and the Patriot Act, its details are more current. As evidence seems to implicate Russian agents in the attack, Mullen grows obsessed with a leftist hacktivist collective, a provocateur talk show host (Dan Stevens) who fans the conspiratorial flames and an extremist tech billionaire (Gaby Hoffman) who would be happy to tear the whole system down.
As it reaches peak crisis and hysteria, the series resembles a paranoid movie thriller — think “The Parallax View” (1974) or “Three Days of the Condor” (1975) — designed for an era in which authority figures decide that they’re entitled not just to their own opinions, but also their own facts.
“It just seemed like a really interesting way to explore some of the big dynamics that are going on in our world,” Oppenheim said. Specifically, the fact that increasingly “objective truth is a subject of debate,” he said.
De Niro, an emerging Hollywood star during the 1970s conspiracy picture peak, sees similarities between “Zero Day” and those earlier movies — with one key difference.
“This was like doing three features back to back,” he said of the 103-day shoot. “Those were just movies. They’re not as long as this is, so you get a lot more done than what we did in those previous situations.”
“Zero Day” is one of several paranoid thrillers on TV right now. It joins “Paradise,” a sci-fi suspense drama on Hulu about a Secret Service agent (Sterling K. Brown) investigating the death of the U.S. president (James Marsden), and “Severance,” the Apple TV+ series in which some of the employees of a mysterious corporation undergo a surgical separation of their work and home identities.
Of course, the label “paranoid” suggests that the pertinent concerns are unfounded or irrational — an idea that some involved with “Zero Day” reject.
“It’s a cautionary tale about this division that we’re experiencing now, and that’s all too real,” said Lizzy Caplan, who plays a congresswoman in the series. “I don’t think this is some far-out-in-the-future, dystopian possibility,” she added. “I think it’s inches away from us.”
Whatever its contemporary political relevance, the show’s melodramatic plot mechanics keep it within the realm of TV fantasy. Caplan’s character is not just any lawmaker — she is Alexandra Mullen, the former president’s daughter, and she has concerns about her father and his work. She is also sleeping with his fixer, Roger Carlson (Jesse Plemons), who is being blackmailed by a shady hedge funder (Clark Gregg) with an agenda that may or may not be related to the cyberattack. The “Zero Day” web can get comically tangled.
The filmmaking itself is more grounded. Conspiracy and paranoia have their own aesthetic designed to make the viewer feel powerless, as if some all-seeing eye is always on the job. Lesli Linka Glatter, an executive producer who also directed all six episodes of “Zero Day,” sought to create a sense of anxiety within scenes by alternating between objective and subjective points of view and between different camera modes, like Steadicam and dolly shots.
“I did a lot of shots that had a very heavy ceiling, that make it feel like the world is oppressive, weighing down on you, and there’s a little human in there,” she said. “I wanted to get the sense that the ground we are standing on is not solid. You feel it almost internally more than you can put your finger on what it is.” (Glatter was also a director and executive producer of the deeply paranoid Showtime series “Homeland.”)
The predominant tone in the conspiracy films of the 1970s is futility. The heroes are generally up against forces they can’t comprehend. As Newman put it, “There’s this sort of oppressive theme of a system that’s a monolith and impenetrable. We talked about all those films again and again and again, and we aspired to that.”
Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes felt it at the end of “Chinatown” (1974), crushed by corrupt forces more powerful than he can ever be. In Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974), Gene Hackman’s surveillance expert Harry Caul, not terribly stable to begin with, is driven mad after his very secretive work leads to a murder.
This was the age of the Warren Report, Vietnam and Watergate, when distrust in the government spread rapidly through a country on edge. “There’s a reason why so many great conspiracy films were made in the ’60s and ’70s,” Oppenheim said. “Whenever there’s tumult in society, I think this genre has a resurgence.”
But if the U.S. is going through a similar instability now, all is not lost in “Zero Day.” There’s a sliver of hope at the end of the series, or at least something that pushes beyond pure fatalism.
“We very consciously reject the futility that is sometimes suggested by those ’70s conspiracy thrillers,” Oppenheim said. “We hopefully point to a path forward for people. As broken as any system might be, every one of us still has a moral compass inside ourselves, and we can still choose to do the right things.”
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