Netflix's Zero Day Is a Misguided Boomer Fantasy

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the series finale of Zero Day.]

Netflix's Zero Day falls somewhere between The West Wing and a disaster movie, with Robert De Niro embodying a familiar archetype: the aging hero who comes out of retirement for one last job. At a spry 81 years of age, he plays former U.S. president George Mullen — an unlikely protagonist for a conspiracy thriller about cyber terrorism.

Enjoying a prosperous retirement, Mullen spends his days jogging around his luxurious estate and procrastinating on his memoirs. Then a catastrophic cyberattack hits the nation, and the current president (Angela Bassett) puts Mullen in charge of a task force to identify the perpetrators.

Much like 9/11, the so-called Zero Day attack leads the government to embrace extreme measures like suspending habeas corpus, and we're encouraged to see George Mullen as a uniquely appropriate leader for the moment. Not because he knows anything about cyber terrorism, but because he belongs to a bygone era of bipartisan cooperation and ethical backbone. If the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, then George Mullen is the man you want with his finger on the trigger. Supposedly.

More on Zero Day:

• Zero Day review: Netflix's thriller isn't that serious
• Netflix's Zero Day ending explained: Who was behind the cyberattack? What is Proteus?

Echoing classic conspiracy thrillers like The Fugitive and The Parallax View, Zero Day opens with the protagonist's world being plunged into chaos. This genre thrives on uncertainty and paranoia, provoking suspicion about the reliability of traditional authorities. Corrupt cops pursue innocent targets, government agents plant false evidence, and sophisticated conspiracies manipulate the halls of power.

At first, Zero Day treads familiar ground for this kind of story. But by the end it feels like a bizarrely contradictory take, revealing that the U.S. government has been infiltrated by a terrorist conspiracy… but we should still trust the system. George Mullen represents a wish-fulfillment fantasy where a sensible elder statesman steps in to save the day. In 2025, this feels wildly out of touch, beginning with Mullen's characterization as an elderly white man with minimal expertise in the problem he's trying to solve. 

Despite several subplots where Mullen's ethics are called into question — for instance, when he tortures a suspect or accidentally arrests an innocent teenager — he ends the show on a high note, successfully uncovering a nationwide conspiracy before returning to his cozy retirement. It's an unmistakably boomer-oriented fantasy, not just because of Mullen's age, but because the premise presents such an outdated view of American politics. As Mullen takes a stand against the show's villains in the final episode, it's impossible not to think about his real-world counterparts: a generation of elderly centrist Democrats who failed to take decisive action against their opponents, resulting in some very real catastrophes this year. 

Zero Day's writers are clearly reluctant to depict realistic political divides, barely hinting at which characters belong to which party — although we're led to assume that Mullen is a Democrat, while his antagonist Richard Dreyer (Matthew Modine) is a Republican. Instead, the show takes place in an almost comically centrist version of reality, right down to the revelation that the Zero Day attack was orchestrated by a bipartisan coalition of malevolent billionaires and politicians from both sides of the aisle. 

Mullen's role initially calls back to The West Wing's beloved President Bartlet, a likeable intellectual known for his inspiring speeches. However, the middle few episodes introduce some complicating factors, inviting us to wonder if Mullen is actually unfit for the job at hand. 

Episode 1 drops some early hints that Mullen is having memory problems, concluding with a bombshell revelation. Arriving home to find a strange man in his kitchen, Mullen demands to know what's happening. "Where's Hector?" he shouts, referring to an employee who appeared in several earlier scenes. "Hector retired five years ago," his wife replies. So Mullen isn't just dealing with a shaky memory; he's outright hallucinating. This probably isn't someone who should have access to the entire intelligence apparatus of the United States government.

Over the next few episodes, Mullen experiences more memory lapses, mood swings, and hallucinations, directly impacting his command of the task force. Rather than voicing his doubts about Mullen's behavior, his closest advisor covers for him and continues to follow orders. Meanwhile, Mullen's wife recruits his former chief of staff to keep him on the straight and narrow. It's an alarming glimpse of how cronyism and misplaced loyalty can protect the reputation of aging leaders who should no longer wield this kind of power.

For a while, Mullen's mental health issues tease a far darker and more interesting drama than Zero Day ultimately turns out to be. As we discover the extent of Mullen' instability, it's easy to draw parallels to current events. We can all name one or two politicians who stayed in office long after they should have stepped down. 

Then in Episode 4, this storyline takes a bizarre turn. Rather than suffering from dementia, it turns out that Mullen may actually have been targeted by a neurological weapon named Proteus. After passing a cognitive test, he decides to ignore his symptoms and continue leading the task force, eventually uncovering the show's pivotal conspiracy and ending the story as a hero. We're also expected to handwave the fact that he tortured suspects and detained innocent people. Falling foul of a particularly distasteful post-9/11 trope, Zero Day buys into the idea that "enhanced interrogation methods" can be a necessary evil, and while good people struggle with the moral decision to cross the line, the ends may justify the means. 

Throughout all this, one of Mullen's most vocal critics is his own daughter, Alexandra (Lizzy Caplan), an implicitly left-leaning congresswoman who sees the Zero Day task force as an example of fascist overreach. She's horrified by the way her father uses his newfound powers, exacerbating the friction in their strained relationship.

In the show's boomer-centric narrative, Alexandra acts as a stand-in for younger adults who disagree with their parents over politics. And in the last couple of episodes, this conflict comes to a head in an unexpected way. Alexandra turns out to be one of the conspirators, naively bamboozled by the promises of its duplicitous leader, Richard Dreyer. She never thought the cyberattack would actually hurt anyone, and when she finally realizes that the conspiracy has gone too far, she confronts her father in a tearful argument where she tries to explain her motives.

The system is broken, Alexandra explains. She can't pass any legislation thanks to partisan gridlock. Dreyer convinced her that the Zero Day attack would magically eliminate extremists from both sides, allowing calmer minds to prevail. "We took a big chance to change things for the better," she argues. Mullen counters that instead of resorting to terrorism, the real solution is to "work at it" within an imperfect system. 

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As the argument heats up, father and daughter both voice familiar talking points across the generational divide. Alexandra accuses George of being disconnected from the reality of modern politics, while George argues that she's oversimplifying things. He represents the old-school establishment, while she represents a younger generation who no longer trust the system. It's a relatable conflict that the show inevitably skews in the older generation's favor. After hitching her wagon to a terrorist plot, Alexandra finds herself weeping in front of her father, apologizing and pleading for him to take charge and tell her what to do next.

Maybe it's my own millennial bias showing, but Alex comes across as a transparently obvious strawman in this debate, allowing Mullen to forgive his naively idealistic daughter and prove that there's hope for traditional law and order after all.

In Zero Day's final scenes, Mullen unveils Dreyer's conspiracy on live TV, while Alexandra admits culpability and hands herself over to the authorities. A montage depicts crowds of American citizens watching Mullen's speech with rapt fascination, applauding his stalwart dedication to justice. Even this relies on an absurdly old-fashioned image of how the public interacts with electoral politics, in a show that elsewhere displays a very shallow understanding of internet culture and social media.

Like all those movies where aging action heroes prove that they've still got it, Zero Day is fundamentally nostalgic. It's not actually interested in how contemporary anxieties might fuel a modern conspiracy thriller, at a time when mainstream politics are shaped by conspiracies both real and imagined. Mass surveillance. January 6. Antivaxxers. Shady billionaires controlling the flow of information. This stuff is real and terrifying, and it disrupts people's trust in the laws and norms they were taught to believe in. Last year's Netflix drama The Madness did a pretty good job of incorporating these dangers into a present-day conspiracy thriller, but Zero Day barely even makes an attempt. Instead, it wants to wrap things up with a comforting return to 20th century expectations, concluding on an impressively unrelatable note. 

Zero Day is now streaming on Netflix.