When a popular former president is drafted in to lead the investigation into a lethal nationwide cyber-attack, it seems that he himself is the target of something far more sinister.

I want to put this out there. I think that cyber-attack dramas make for terrible TV. Just because I’m staring at my screen like a gormless idiot, it doesn’t mean I want to watch highly paid actors staring at their screens for six hours, albeit giant ones in implausible ‘situation rooms’ and doing that comical ‘computer-says-no’ manic keyboard tapping, which I think they must teach in drama schools now. In fact, it’s amazing I’m still here. A few years ago I nearly lost the will to live during Channel 4’s mind numbing The Undeclared War. And while it was funny in places, the BBC’s ridiculous Nightsleeper consisted mainly of people talking to their phones, while a computer hacker successfully managed to get a British train to actually run on time.

The thing I can never get past, is that all these shows are predicated on the idea that computer systems actually work, which as we all know to our cost and daily irritation, they usually don’t. Oh and the download speeds on those machines! Wowzas! Could someone tell my internet provider, please!

So it was that I sat down to watch Netflix’s new cyberhack thriller, Zero Day, with my critical phaser set to ‘kill’. Sadly, I’ve had to put my weapon down. I think it’s a brilliant show… perhaps a bit too brilliant for its own good in places.

Meet ex-President George Mullen played by none other than Robert Bloody De Niro who immediately adds an aura to the show because he rarely graces our TV screens. De Niro is one of the last true movie stars, so we know from the off he won’t have signed unless he thinks the script is up to muster and the director knows what they’re doing.

Mullen is a barely disguised idealized iteration of Joe Biden. A decent guy, pushing eighty, haunted by regrets over his dead son, fighting a losing battle against the frailties of age by taking a wobbly jog every morning. Today, he’s meeting the ghostwriter for the long promised memoir he still hasn’t got round to yet, sent by his impatient publisher. We can tell there are secrets he isn’t ready to divulge, and she is sent away on the promise that he will deliver something very soon, after all, he has kept detailed hand written notebooks throughout his long career.

As she is driven away empty handed, the cyber-attack hits, bringing the whole nation to a standstill at the cost of over three thousand lives – on a par with 9/11. The country is under attack. Is it the Russians? The Iranians? Domestic Terrorists?

Current President, Evelyn Mitchell (Angela Bassett) brings Mullen out of retirement to head up the commission to find the instigators and bring them to justice. Against his better judgement, Mullen is persuaded to take the gig by his wife, Sheila (Joan Allen). He is reluctant because he’s experiencing auditory and visual hallucinations – most notably The Sex Pistols’ Who Killed Bambi? seems to be playing on a loop. Then there are the momentary confusions, brain fog and intermittent blanking. The Biden parallels get more resonant by the minute.

Of course there are plenty on ‘The Hill’ who aren’t happy about the appointment. Matthew Modine’s oily Speaker of the House, Richard Dreyer, and more intriguingly, Mullen’s own conflicted daughter Alex (Lizzy Caplan), herself a New York Congresswoman. Throw into the mix Mullen’s staffer Roger Carlson (Jesse Plemons) a recovering addict who’s also having an affair with his boss’s daughter.

At this point, no more should be said about the plot to avoid spoilers, aside from the revelation there was a secret government programme to develop a neurological weapons system called Proteus, supposedly shut down many years before…

Okay, on a nuts and bolts level, it could be said that this is nothing more than a well-crafted tech thriller, and even if that’s all you get from it, I’d say it was well worth your time, but let’s dig into why I think there’s more to it than that.

What makes this more than another cyber-bore with actors gawping at screens pretending they have the foggiest idea of what’s going on is the fragility of Mullen’s character. It’s Robert De Niro for heaven’s sake, with all that goes with his own screen legend. But here, what’s lurking in the shadows, is his own infirmity. I don’t know about you, but Bobby has been frustrating me of late – well for a couple of decades actually. He seems to have swapped the fractured inscrutability of Travis Bickle, Rupert Pupkin, Johnny Boy Cicvello, the young Vito Corleone, Jake LaMotta et al for an annoying, gurning parody of his former greatness.

In Zero Day he is back on form. Director Lesli Linka Glatter has clearly threatened him with ten kinds of torture if he even dares to pull one of the faces and shrugs we’ve become so accustomed to. De Niro’s Mullen is simultaneously solid as Mount Rushmore and fragile as a lark’s eggshell, losing confidence in his own senses in sequences that echo Anthony Hopkins in Alzheimer’s drama The Father. This is a focused, no-nonsense, no tricks performance. De Niro just plays every moment like he means it.

Consequently the cast who signed up alongside him are all raising their games too. Jesse Plemons is better than I’ve ever seen him as Mullen’s flawed, unhappy staffer. Joan Allen is the perfect foil as the super canny ex-First Lady watching his back – more Hilary Clinton than Jill Biden. Dan Stevens as a dodgy YouTube agitator is better than I’ve seen him anything.

But it isn’t just about the quality of the acting and direction, in story terms Zero Day is attempting something other shows would definitely balk from. At about the three-quarter point it appears to drop its intriguing ambiguities for a more mundane Tom Clancy style conspiracy yarn, wrapped up in cuddly West Wing sensibilities. While there’s no denying that this acts to strip a good deal of more flavoursome nuances from the show, and my heart started to sink, by the end, for me, Zero Day more than redeemed itself.

This is incredibly intelligent writing. It poses the most fundamental question that both conspiracists – and more importantly conspiracy sceptics – need to ask themselves: When is a conspiracy not a conspiracy? Most skillfully of all, Zero Day poses this question to both sides of that argument. Are conspiracy sceptics just as poisoned by their own mentality as those they seek to debunk? The eye of the beholder and all that…

Zero Day has the confidence to depict conspiracies as they actually manifest in real life; about as reliable as the computers we fictionally attribute with powers we could only dream of. It also asks something even more hair-raising, more challenging: What happens when the conspirators are, essentially, right?

Verdict: I don’t think anyone would argue with Zero Day’s classy credentials. Some will find its narrative left turn a disappointment. I thought it was a stroke of genius. 9/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com