Quick thoughts on two Netflix limited series today. Minor spoilers ahead.
"Zero Day" is a show that I had been anticipating for a while. It features an unusually high profile cast, including Robert DeNiro as ex-president George Mullen, Joan Allen as his wife, Lizzy Caplan as his estranged daughter, and Jesse Plemmons as his personal aide. Angela Bassett plays the sitting president. Every episode is directed by Leslie Linka Glatter. The showrunner is Eric Newman, best known for "Narcos." In short, "Zero Day" has a pedigree that few other series could match. And somehow, it's borderline unwatchable.
What "Zero Day" wants to be is a political thriller about the aftermath of a fictional cyberattack on the United States, which destabilizes the country. Mullen is appointed to be the chairman of a special commission to find the perpetrators, and resorts to some very questionable means to do this. As you'd expect, there's a lot of sensationalism, a lot of improbable political developments, and a lot of chances for Robert DeNiro to give impassioned speeches. The trouble is that "Zero Day" had the misfortune to have been delayed by the recent strikes, and was released in early 2025. "Zero Day" is patterned more or less on the US response to 9/11. Thus, it is operating in a political reality that bears absolutely no resemblance to the present day. The secret conspiracies look absolutely ridiculous when the people currently in office are doing much worse out in the open without real consequences. The cyberattack and resulting transportation and telecommunications failures aren't examined in any real depth, despite featuring so heavily in the marketing. Instead, they're just the impetus for generic civil unrest that never seems as threatening as it's made out to be.
I think what really sinks the show is that we see everything play out mostly from Mullen's very limited POV, and somehow everything important ties back to him personally. It's his daughter who happens to be the Representative tasked with monitoring the special commission's activities. He has personal relationships with nearly every important figure involved in the story. It feels like the creators don't trust the audience to be engaged by the political drama without piling so much personal drama on top of it. There are some attempts to reflect the current political landscape, such as including influential tech moguls and a loudmouth conspiracy theorist as thorns in Mullen's side, but it just makes it all the more obvious how tone-deaf and out of date "Zero Day" is. The answers are too easy and the problems are too quickly resolved, the result of a small group of bad actors who can be handily dispatched after Mullen makes a few tough decisions. I don't mind DeNiro getting to flex a bit, and I enjoyed seeing everybody from Dan Stevens to Connie Britton popping up in supporting roles, but too much of "Zero Day" is indulgent political fantasy with no depth to speak of.
And now, on to something completely different. Shondaland's latest project is "The Residence," an eight episode murder mystery comedy that takes place in the White House. Created by Paul William Davies, "The Residence" follows the efforts of consulting detective Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba) as she tries to solve the murder of the White House's Head Usher, A.B. Wynter (Giancalo Esposito), during a state dinner for the Prime Minister of Australia (Julian McMahon). There is a very long list of suspects, including an executive pastry chef played by Bronson Pinchot, Ken Marino as a scummy presidential advisor, Jason Lee as the president's even scummier brother, and Kylie Minogue, appearing as herself. However, Cordelia Cupp doesn't believe in suspects. She believes in keen observation, scrupulous journaling, and birding. And she does all of these things constantly as she tries to piece together what happened to A.B.
"The Residence" is the most flat-out fun I've had with a murder mystery series in some time. It's extremely well written and well edited, juggling lots of different characters and incidents and clues. Each episode introduces more suspects - the engineer (Mel Rodriguez), the social secretary (Molly Griggs), the party crasher (Timothy Hornor), the ambitious underling (Susan Kelechi Watson), and the president's mother-in-law (Jane Curtin), just to name a few - and shows us events from many different POVs. It's immensely satisfying when everything pieces together in the end. The show is very self-aware, with Detective Cupp and her Watson figure, Agent Park (Randall Park), calling out tropes when they come across them, all the episodes named after other famous mysteries, and a framing device with Al Franken running a Congressional hearing into the murder for more meta commentary. I really like the way some of the exposition is done, using montages of different interviews and conversations so that many disparate characters appear to be relaying bits of the same story, responding to each other, and adding to each other's testimonies. Brief clips of particularly pivotal moments come back multiple times over the course of the show, building on each other, and helping the audience to keep track of different theories. The Wes Anderson-ian humor is also great, with sight gags and silly callbacks galore.
Despite taking place in the White House, "The Residence" is apolitical, and a nice break from reality. Well, the President (Paul Fitzgerald) has a First Gentleman (Barrett Foa) instead of a First Lady, and Senator Bix (Eliza Coupe) bears a resemblance to a certain Republican Congresswoman, but the specifics never match up. Instead, the show is very concerned with the inner workings of the White House as its own institution. A nonfiction book, The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House, by Kate Anderson Brower, is credited as the main inspiration for the show, and a significant amount of time is spent spotlighting all the different employees and departments that keep the place running, from the Head Usher to the butlers, gardeners, housekeepers, kitchen staff, and security personnel. In the course of trying to figure out whodunnit, we learn all the ins and outs of the fictional household, and it's fascinating stuff. One of the show's best visuals is when it shows us dollhouse-like views of the White House, to highlight the different rooms in relation to each other.
I want to give special kudos to Uzo Aduba, who puts her own stamp on the eccentric detective figure. Cordelia Cupp is odd, stubborn, and brilliant, as many fictional detectives are, but also wonderfully patient, accepting, and self-aware of her own flaws. It's a lot of fun to watch her work, and I hope to see her again in another mystery someday.
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