Something for Your Weekend | Recommended Spy Film to Watch
🎬 This Week’s Pick: Zero Day (2025)
Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, Michael Schmidt · Netflix · 6 episodes Where to watch: Netflix
🎬 This Week’s Pick: Zero Day (2025)
Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, Michael Schmidt · Netflix · 6 episodes Where to watch: Netflix
Why this series
Robert De Niro has never starred in a television series before. That alone makes Zero Day worth your attention. But the reason it belongs in this column is simpler: it takes a question most people have thought about: what would actually happen if someone switched everything off, and follows it to uncomfortable places.
The story, without spoilers
A cyberattack hits the United States. Not a hack that steals data or embarrasses a politician. A real attack, one that shuts systems down across the country and kills thousands of people. Nobody knows who did it. Nobody knows if it will happen again.
The sitting president, played by Angela Bassett, pulls former President George Mullen out of retirement to lead the investigation. Mullen is old, trusted, and seen as the one person who might be able to hold a frightened and divided country together long enough to find out the truth.
But the deeper Mullen digs, the more he discovers that powerful people on all sides, in government, in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, would prefer the truth stayed buried. And Mullen himself is not quite the steady hand everyone believes him to be.
What makes it special
The cast is extraordinary. Jesse Plemons as a political fixer carrying too many loyalties. Lizzy Caplan as Mullen’s ambitious daughter in Congress. Joan Allen, Connie Britton, Dan Stevens, Matthew Modine, Bill Camp, every episode puts serious actors in rooms together and lets them work.
The series is uneven. Some episodes move slowly, and the critics were divided. But when it works, it works because it is not really about a cyberattack. It is about what happens to a country when nobody can agree on what is true any more, and when finding the truth might be more dangerous than the attack itself.
One last thing
Six episodes. One weekend. De Niro has never done this before, and he chose this story to do it with. That is recommendation enough.
Something for Your Weekend returns every weekend with one recommended title for readers who take intelligence seriously.