Zero Day (American TV series)

Zero Day is an American political thriller television miniseries created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, and Michael Schmidt for Netflix, directed by Lesli Linka Glatter, and featuring an ensemble cast led by Robert De Niro. It is about a former president investigating a devastating zero-day cyberattack in the US. The series was released on Netflix on February 20, 2025 and received mixed reviews from critics.
A former President of the United States is given vast powers by his successor to investigate an unprecedented cyberterrorist attack on the United States that resulted in thousands of deaths.
It was reported in November 2022 that Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, and Michael Schmidt had conceived of the story, with Newman and Oppenheim writing the pilot script. With Robert De Niro attached to star, he would also serve as executive producer alongside Newman, Oppenheim, Jonathan Glickman of Panoramic Media, and Schmidt. The project was confirmed as greenlit by Netflix on March 1, 2023. Lesli Linka Glatter would direct. The series was released on February 20, 2025.
In April 2023, Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons, Joan Allen, and Connie Britton were revealed to have joined the cast. In December 2023, Bill Camp, Matthew Modine, Dan Stevens, McKinley Belcher III, Gaby Hoffmann, Mark Ivanir and Clark Gregg joined the cast. In February 2024, Mozhan Navabi joined the cast.
An application for filming a train crash was submitted in Westchester County, New York for July 2023. Filming had started in and around New York but production was suspended with crew and cast sent home in June 2023 due to the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike. Production resumed by that December.
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 54% approval rating with an average rating of 5.7/10, based on 65 critic reviews. The website's critics consensus reads, "Zero Day has plenty of gravitas thanks to its all-star cast led by Robert De Niro, but this high-concept series' plotting is a little too goofy for it to take itself so seriously." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 51 out of 100 based on 35 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.
Lucy Mangan of The Guardian described this portrayal of a "good man struggling to do the right thing in a world that offers corruption at worst, and only compromise at best."
The Hollywood Reporter described the series in an unflattering review as "The New York Times opinion section brought to life in its barely left-tilting centrism."
"Tech oligarchs, the gerontocracy, podcasters spouting misinformation and the erosion of civil liberties all blur into a muddy soup that's adjacent to relevancy without ever achieving it", according to a review in Variety.
In a generally favorable review in the New York Times the series is described as "a contemporary update of a ’70s-style political drama that is even more contemporary than anticipated" and is compared with paranoia infused films of that era including The Conversation (1974) , Chinatown (1974), The Parallax View (1974) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). Although the review describes some aspects of the plot as "comically tangled", it concludes that the "filmmaking itself is more grounded" and that the ending contains a "sliver of hope".