Zero Day

De Niro looks bored and Bassett has been asked to do little more than appear serious and concerned in a few scenes. It’s surprising to see the talents of two of Hollywood’s most skillful actors squandered, but that’s true of the cast as a whole, who aren’t asked to play characters so much as chess pieces. And the writing is clunky.

It’s a show that never reconciles its ridiculous character choices with its political commentary, a soap opera that wants to be “important” too. This is not to say that a show can’t be a conversation starter and a thriller at the same time, only that “Zero Day” is neither.

Mostly, any flicker of emotional complexity gets trampled by the plot as it barrels forward in five different directions at once. A whole lot happens in Zero Day, it’s true… but I can’t say I cared much about any of it.

What we get instead is a pundit-brained muddle designed to exploit national anxieties while studiously avoiding any hint of a point of view, riffing on recognizable figures but ignoring the context that produced them.

Mullen becomes one of the most trusted people in this country based on a cult of personality, a carefully curated image that he expects the American public to accept because he tells them so. With that uncritical treatment of a man whose most defining characteristic is his aura, Zero Day falls exactly into the trap that it’s ostensibly warning its viewers against.

A flat, nonsensical clunker that, at six episodes, somehow feels both draggy and rushed at the same time.

The show gets lost in its own navel-gazing plot and cardboard characters, quickly stranding its leading man in a quagmire of clichés that even he can’t sell.

Wastes an undeniably spectacular cast on a fundamentally silly and unrealistic story that badly wants to be taken as serious and realistic. The truth is that the cast is too good for Zero Day not to be watchable, but its self-congratulatory conviction that it’s far smarter than it actually is makes it hard to embrace on more than a speculative “What are all these people doing here?” level.

It's dangerous putting the word "zero" in your title because all I can think of is that I have zero interest in this story, zero thought about it after I've watched it and zero recommendations for anyone else to tune in.