DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. Robert De Niro has been a movie star for more than 50 years - and still is. But occasionally, very occasionally, he also pops up as an actor on television. For NBC, he was a guest star on one episode of "30 Rock" and appeared close to 10 times on "Saturday Night Live." For HBO, he starred in "The Wizard Of Lies," Barry Levinson's made-for-TV movie about Bernie Madoff. And two years ago, he appeared in and narrated a little-known five-episode Argentinian TV mini-series called "Nada," playing the American friend of a caustic Buenos Aires food critic.
Except for De Niro's contributions, "Nada" is subtitled. It's also very funny, delightful in its playful approach to both food and language and available to stream on Hulu. Thanks to Netflix, another entry has just been added to Robert De Niro's TV resume. He's starring in "Zero Day," a new six-part political thriller about a chilling cyber-terrorist attack on the United States. With no warning and no explanation, all the electronic and computerized systems in the country stopped working for precisely one minute, resulting in widespread havoc, unchecked panic and - during those 60 seconds - thousands of deaths. When systems are restored, everyone with a cell phone receives the same frightening text message - this will happen again.
That makes part of "Zero Day" a mystery, a thriller and a race against time, with the president of the United States forced to act quickly against an unknown, unseen enemy. But it's also a political drama with various factions inside Congress and in the media stoking panic or using the crisis to advance their own personal agendas. It deals with abuse of power, political overreach and questionable decisions, subjects that make "Zero Day" almost mind-blowingly topical. In this TV drama, after the cyberattack, there's a lot of anger and paranoia and finger-pointing and division.
And that's where De Niro comes in. He plays former President George Mullen, one of the last leaders popular on both sides of the political spectrum. His former chief of staff, played by the always impressive Jesse Plemons, visits Mullen right after the cyberattack. He urges him to make a public appearance at a New York City disaster site, where survivors may be trapped under the rubble, to help calm things down. An angry crowd, fed by conspiracy theories and blaming the current administration, is pushing against police barricades when the former president arrives and spontaneously addresses the crowd. TV cameras already are there, and Mullen's impromptu remarks are shown relayed on live TV throughout the nation as a rare and welcome voice of reason.
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ROBERT DE NIRO: (As George Mullen) Hey. Hey. Please. What's the matter with you? This is exactly what they want us to do.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Who's they, Mullen? You don't even know who they are.
DE NIRO: (As George Mullen) You're right. I don't know who they are. Neither do you. None of us do. But if we keep shouting at each other like this, what are we going to accomplish? We're Americans. What are we doing? We're supposed to be standing up for each other. We're supposed to be helping each other. What, you think you're doing the right thing? No, you're not. You're afraid. And you think if you get worked up over some conspiracy nonsense that that won't make you afraid? No. You're not behaving like an American nor a patriot. You're here standing up for the little guy? The working man?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Someone has to.
DE NIRO: (As George Mullen) Well, there are working men and women buried right beneath our feet right here. You don't trust the government? I get that. It hasn't always come through for everybody, but this isn't about the government or the 1% or whatever the hell you want to call them. It's about somebody out there that hates us and stands against everything that we stand for, everything that makes us who we are. And they found a way to hurt us. It's that simple. And right now these people need to get back to work and get those people out, and you need to let them. You want to stand by and offer your support and your prayers? That's great, but please just do it from behind the barricade.
BIANCULLI: Because of that performance, Mullen is summoned immediately to the Oval Office by the current president, played by Angela Bassett. He doesn't know it, but she's about to appoint him to head a very powerful, potentially unconstitutional task force.
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ANGELA BASSETT: (As Evelyn Mitchell) Usually, a zero-day vulnerability exists on a single operating system - your iPhone, say. But this thing exploited unknown vulnerabilities across dozens of systems. It shut those systems off for exactly one minute and then turned everything back on again.
DE NIRO: (As George Mullen) So that wasn't us?
BASSETT: (As Evelyn Mitchell) No. We had barely gotten our people into it when everything came back on line.
DE NIRO: (As George Mullen) There was no ransom demand? Nobody claimed responsibility? Nothing like that?
BASSETT: (As Evelyn Mitchell) Just that insidious threat. We're running shifts at Meade, trying to sort through a digital trail that is basically the Gordian knot.
DE NIRO: (As George Mullen) So what's the plan?
BASSETT: (As Evelyn Mitchell) Congress is authorizing a special investigatory commission and endowing it with extraordinary powers commensurate with the scale of this emergency. They will be granting this commission powers of surveillance, powers of search and seizure. If necessary, even the suspension of habeas corpus.
DE NIRO: (As George Mullen) Jesus, Evelyn. We didn't even do that after 9/11.
BASSETT: (As Evelyn Mitchell) This is different. We knew who did it then. We have no clue here and no time to spare. We need an entity with all the powers of every law enforcement and intelligence agency put together operating on American soil.
DE NIRO: (As George Mullen) You're just going to grab people off the streets without warrants?
BASSETT: (As Evelyn Mitchell) Actually, you are.
BIANCULLI: The supporting players in "Zero Day," in addition to Plemons and Bassett, include other top-tier actors - Joan Allen, Connie Britton, Lizzy Caplan, Matthew Modine, Dan Stevens, Bill Camp. All of them are actors I've raved about in the past, and they all contribute strongly to this mini-series. And while "Zero Day" is a work of fiction, it's structured to make it easy to draw parallels to real-life events and figures. There's a right-wing media figure stirring up trouble, an elderly politician whose mental faculties may be slipping, Russian operatives and Silicon Valley billionaires in the shadows, and so on.
And on "Zero Day," the scripted events of this TV mini-series are relayed by actual newspeople portraying themselves, including Wolf Blitzer, Savannah Guthrie and Nicolle Wallace. Behind the scenes, the creators and co-writers of "Zero Day" include Wallace's husband, New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt, and Noah Oppenheim, former president of NBC News. Their narrative, also written with Eric Newman of the TV series "Narcos," builds nicely and with very little predictability.
One element missing is humor - there's hardly a drop of it in the entire show. But the story escalates dramatically, like such recent TV political thrillers as "The Agency" and "The Diplomat." And all six episodes of "Zero Day" are directed by Lesli Linka Glatter who worked on both "Homeland" and "Mad Men." She uses images in a way that conjures their own sense of mystery and adds to the intensity of "Zero Day," as do all the actors from De Niro on down. So add Netflix's "Zero Day" to your streaming list, and while you're at it, add Hulu's "Nada." Two very different De Niro performances but two very good television programs.
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BIANCULLI: One quick production note. On last week's show, when we saluted the 50th anniversary of "Saturday Night Live," I made a mistake in my introduction. I said that the show's producer, Lorne Michaels, had offered comedian George Carlin the chance to be permanent host of the show, but he suggested a rotating host approach instead and hosted only the premiere episode. It was the right story but the wrong comedian. Lorne Michaels actually had made that offer to another comic who appeared on that first show - Albert Brooks. It was Brooks who suggested the rotating hosts, and it was I who misremembered it and made the mistake. I apologize for the error.
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BIANCULLI: On Monday's show, the Catholic Church has been described as the world's last true monarchy, with enormous power concentrated in the Vatican. Philip Shenon talks about the last seven popes and how efforts to reform the Church with the Second Vatican Council led to decadeslong doctrinal debates and power struggles. Shenon's book is "Jesus Wept." Join us.
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BIANCULLI: To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram - @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Briger is our managing producer. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Herzfeld and Diana Martinez. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper.
For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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