Zero Day, Netflix's new limited series starring Robert De Niro, is a conspiracy thriller set in the aftermath of a cyberattack. Elements of the story feel disturbingly plausible, especially the depiction of America as not being prepared for a large-scale cyberattack, and how, after the attack, Americans will not even be able to agree on the truth of what happened. Those concepts inspired the creation of the show, according to co-creator Eric Newman. And even though things about the show are implausible, and it’s first and foremost meant to be fun, twisty entertainment, it's supposed to frighten you a little bit, too. Newman says the thing that scared him the most while researching the show was “finding out how unprepared we would actually be for something like this.”
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The idea for the show came about when Newman got together with his friend Noah Oppenheim, who became his co-creator, in November 2021. At the time, Oppenheim was the president of NBC News. “I asked him about where we were going as a country, in terms of how we process our news. And what he said horrified me, which is that we are moving towards mutually exclusive alternate realities that have to coexist despite their diametrical opposition to one another,” Newman says. “It sparked in us a conversation about, how do we tell a story that says that, without really vilifying either side.”
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'
At the beginning of the show, unknown hackers shut down America’s entire power grid for one minute, which causes the deaths of thousands of people. During the attack, a frightening message gets sent to every cell phone in America, threatening “THIS WILL HAPPEN AGAIN.” The hackers found a weakness in the system the owners didn’t know about and exploited it, allowing them to take control and sow chaos and panic. President Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett) quickly recruits former President George Mullen (De Niro), who has bipartisan appeal, to lead an investigative commission to find the people responsible and keep another attack from happening. Mullen is granted — and uses — unprecedented powers to detain persons of interest without warrants, which leads to even deeper distrust of the government. He’s also experiencing some cognitive issues that may or may not be of natural causes, and they’re making him behave strangely, which doesn’t help people’s faith in the system. CIA director Jeremy Lasch (Bill Camp) says the agency’s models predict a social breakdown if answers are not provided to the public within 24-to-28 days, so the clock is ticking for Mullen to discover the truth.
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
As for a clampdown on civil liberties after a cyberattack, one only has to look to the recent past to see how it could happen. “What's always the case, in everything from 9/11 to other attacks, it's really about the reaction — what do we do as a society when we're scared?” Newman posits. “And in the case of our story, and I think 9/11 as well, we surrender civil liberties. We make impulsive decisions that aren't necessarily rooted in fact. And the hope is that we have good, smart people at the helm who make the right decision when it counts. That's the aspirational aspect of Zero Day for us.”
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
The writers talked to a lot of experts, some of whom didn’t want to be named because they deal with sensitive material, because the show needed to feel authentic. “The audience has become quite politically savvy,” Newman says. People’s increased attention to politics has made them attuned to what rings true or false in political-themed entertainment. “To make the situation feel real, to make the stakes feel real, we needed to be deeply authentic,” Newman says. “And also, having come out of Narcos and shows that are largely nonfiction that I've made, I felt sort of an obligation that while this is a completely fictionalized story, it needs to line up in a reality that feels relatable.”
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.
Zero Day is now streaming on Netflix.
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