A twisting, timely cyber-thriller
Insightful conversations from Netflix’s new political conspiracy drama
This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Back in 2010 I was reporting from a former Tsarist barracks that had been turned into a highly classified NATO military base. Estonia, one of the world’s most wired countries, was a natural choice to host the West’s cyber-defence hub — especially as it had been hit by a serious cyber-attack a few years earlier.
There was a whole new vocabulary to learn, with terms such as “drive-by-download”, a malicious programme installed when a link is clicked on, “sandbox”, a secure space on a drive to investigate suspicious software and “zero day”, a software vulnerability that is unknown to the developer and has no patch to fix it.
This is top-down history, serious and sober
Zero Day is the apt title of Netflix’s timely and highly entertaining new political conspiracy drama. Thousands have been killed across the United States in a devastating cyber-attack that has paralysed the government and essential services. A fearful population is demanding answers — which the authorities cannot provide.
Robert de Niro plays George Mullen, a well-regarded former US president brought in to help fix the broken country as the security agencies frantically try and work out who was responsible. It’s a solid performance that anchors the show. Mullen is also an unreliable narrator, hearing things, losing things and fearing that dementia is already setting in.
Early indications point to Moscow as the guilty party, but it’s a golden rule of television mysteries that the first suspect is never guilty. The story twists and turns as the spotlight falls on a mysterious group of cyber-activists in New York that seem to have been planning an attack.
Meanwhile an uber-populist online broadcaster is whipping up fury against the establishment — easy enough when the government is suspending civil rights as it hunts the saboteurs. Mullen and his liberal daughter Alex are political opponents, which brings an extra layer of tension. The final twist is smart and unexpected.
The BBC’s coverage of Israel and Palestine has been much in the news lately. A recent documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, was pulled after David Collier, an investigative journalist, revealed that the programme’s 13-year-old narrator, Abdullah Al-Yazouri, was the son of a Hamas minister.
Further problems erupted, including the repeated, deliberate mistranslation of the word Yahud, Arabic for Jew, as Israeli — a long-standing BBC practice, it emerged. Such bias also feeds ignorance.
In December 2024 Lyse Doucet, the corporation’s chief international correspondent, was reporting from Damascus as the revolution unfolded, proclaiming excitedly about how “diverse” Syria was. “And you can see it here in the Old City, all the different quarters — Jewish, Muslim, Christian. They’re all here. They want to believe they have a space now as Syria embarks on this new chapter.”
Except “they” were not “all here”. A century ago there were around 100,000 Jews in Syria. After decades of state-sponsored pogroms, violence and persecution there are believed to be around nine Jews left.
Perhaps Norma Percy, the producer and creator of numerous well-sourced, informed and insightful documentaries, such as the ground-breaking 1995 series The Death of Yugoslavia, could one day bring to our screens the destruction of the ancient Arab Jewish communities. That is a vastly unreported tragedy.
For now we must be satisfied with her outstanding latest production, Israel and the Palestinians: the Road to October 7, now showing on BBC iPlayer. Quite where that road begins will long be analysed and debated, but several clear staging posts are visible.
One is 19 August 2003, when the series starts, the day that a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 23 people on a bus in Jerusalem. The stuttering peace process was a further fatality. It ended for good on 7 October 2023 in the smoking ruins and bloodstained corpses of the kibbutzes.
The three one-hour episodes are filmed in Percy’s trademark style: contemporaneous footage is intercut with footage of and interviews with political and diplomatic heavy-hitters. This is top-down history, serious and sober, recording the views, hopes and claims of key insiders and decision-makers. The cast includes Hillary Clinton and Condoleeza Rice, giving the policymakers’ and establishment view.
The conversations are insightful and add to our understanding. But the real strength of the series is the footage with those on the ground, such as Ehud Olmert, prime minister of Israel from 2006 to 2009, and, remarkably, a chilling exchange with the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, before he was assassinated in Tehran in July 2024.
In one memorable scene, Olmert holds up the map of the proposed state offered to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, in Jerusalem in September 2008. This is the first time the map has been seen in public, Olmert says. The deal offered the Palestinians around 95 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza. Almost all of the Jewish settlements would be evacuated. Five per cent of the Occupied Territories would be exchanged for lands inside Israel.
Gaza and the West Bank would be linked by a tunnel or highway. Jerusalem would be shared, its holy sites handed to a group of international trustees. It was an extraordinary offer. Olmert urged Abbas to sign the map. He refused.
There are few certainties in the age of Trump. One is that after October 7, Israel will never agree to such terms again.
