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Related: Everything to Know About Netflix's 'Zero Day'
They linked up Michael S. Schmidt, a Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter for The New York Times, who became Zero Day’s third co-creator. “At the time, he was trying to write a story about a very important investigation that was hampered by the mental acuity of the man leading the investigation,” Newman says. “So from that, we came up with this idea about telling a story about an essential investigation, a fact-finding mission, where the investigator’s mechanism by which truth is determined is broken, which is a stand in for us” — that is, all of us. Essentially, it's a commentary on Americans' inability to filter out facts from opinion, spin, conspiracy theory and straight-up lies due to the widespread breakdown of trust in government and media, and the rise of alternative sources sharing their own versions of the truth.
Robert De Niro and Angela Bassett in 'Zero Day'Netflix
A cyberattack is 'inevitable'
Many things that happen on the show feel possible, and Oppenheim and Schmidt’s journalism backgrounds give the show some credibility in the dialogue and details, though Newman made up the “24-to-28 days” number (“If there were such models, no one would share them with us”). The show’s writers researched cyberattacks, and Newman “unfortunately, absolutely” believes a large-scale cyberattack will happen. There have been smaller ones, and “a big one is inevitable,” he says.
“Someone will figure out a vulnerability and exploit it,” Newman says. “I would say it's just a matter of when, and how deep does it go before it’s stopped?”
Robert De Niro in 'Zero Day'Netflix
Newman says that despite some biographical similarities, George Mullen is not inspired by former president Joe Biden. “At the time when we came up with this idea, Biden's mental acuity wasn't even a conversation,” he says. “Maybe in the White House somewhere, someone's saying, ‘hey, you know, the boss was a little off today,’ but in November of ‘21, it wasn't even a thing. We were very surprised to see some of the things we wrote about start to play out in reality. It was slightly disconcerting at times. But no, it did not factor in at all to our construction of Mullen.”
Robert De Niro and Eric Newman attend the 'Zero Day' World Premiere on Feb. 18, 2025 in New York City.Photo by Kevin Mazur/Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Netflix
Part of what makes it relatable is the sense that America is not structurally or psychologically prepared for a cyberattack. Newman says that the distrustful public response to the government’s handling of recent natural disasters is an indicator of how things are likely to go. “That is a central theme of our story, the fact that, were we that need to get to the bottom of something like this, it's very likely that a majority of Americans would not accept the findings, because they would believe that they had to be politicized,” Newman says. Zero Day doesn’t have the answers for how to deal with any of this, but it wants to make you think about it.
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