“When is the last time the country was able to solve any of its problems?” ambitious congresswoman Alexandra Mullen (Lizzy Caplan) screams at her father and former Potus George Mullen (Robert De Niro) in Netflix’s just-launched Zero Day.

It is a fair question for the six-episode political thriller, and for America 2025.

Certainly, in a week that has seen a sitting U.S. president parroting Kremlin bullet points while his manic billionaire buddy takes a blowtorch to the federal government, the political thriller created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim and Michael S. Schmidt and starring De Niro, Caplan, Angela Bassett, Joan Allen, Jesse Plemons, Bill Camp, Connie Britton, Dan Stevens, McKinley Belcher III and Matthew Modine, may provide a much needed sugar high of hope — fictional or not. At the same time, ripped right out of the toxic underbelly of modern America as much as the headlines, Zero Day will show it can happen here,...