‘Zero Day’ Is a Throwback Thriller With Modern Echoes

The new Netflix limited series “Zero Day” has been in development for several years, but it is arriving at a time when its primary themes — regarding presidential overreach, the hacking of the federal government and the persistence of disinformation — are dominating the actual news cycle. It is a contemporary update of a ’70s-style political drama that is even more contemporary than anticipated.

Asked if the time is ripe for a resurgence of the conspiracy thriller, the executive producer Eric Newman was succinct: “We’re living in one.”

Created by Newman and two executive producers with journalism backgrounds — Noah Oppenheim, a former president of NBC News, and Michael S. Schmidt, an investigative reporter for the Washington bureau of The New York Times — “Zero Day” depicts a nightmare scenario in which the United States has been attacked and the person in charge of the response might not be of sound mind.

After a cyber-strike cripples U.S. transportation systems, leaving 3,400 dead from transit accidents and other disasters, a former president named George Mullen (Robert De Niro) is selected to lead an investigative commission. But Mullen has been having hallucinations and keeps hearing the same Sex Pistols song, “Who Killed Bambi?,” on a loop in his head. Is he cracking up? Has his brain been tampered with, à la “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962)?

Whatever the cause, Mullen is soon trampling over civil liberties and resorting to 9/11-era “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including torture, with U.S. citizens.

While “Zero Day” makes explicit reference to 9/11 and the Patriot Act, its details are more current. As evidence seems to implicate Russian agents in the attack, Mullen grows obsessed with a leftist hacktivist collective, a provocateur talk show host (Dan Stevens) who fans the conspiratorial flames and an extremist tech billionaire (Gaby Hoffman) who would be happy to tear the whole system down.