Zero Day OTT release reactions: Robert De Niro's mini-series fails to impress audience, ‘on the nose, preachy’

Zero Day OTT release reactions: ‘The Godfather’ actor Robert De Niro made his TV series debut after a six-decade-long career with a political thriller web series Zero Day, which began streaming on Netflix on Thursday.

Exploring the themes of truth and disinformation, Zero Day is set in the wake of a cyberattack that has inflicted chaos and claimed thousands of lives in the United States.

However, this limited Netflix series, created by Noah Oppenheim and Eric Newman, has failed to impress its audience, who found it “on the nose, preachy and patronizing”.

Here's how Twitter reacted to Zero Day:

Twitter (now X) users claimed the mini-series was “badly written” and “cheaply made”, as they called it a “mediocre show”.

“ZERO DAY was a badly written, badly structured political thriller. Disjointed and rushed. It tried too hard to emulate ‘The Manchurian Candidate’. The cast ensemble were like walking caricatures. On the nose, preachy and patronizing... #ZeroDay kept shooting itself in the foot,” a social media user said.

“I didn't expect Netflix's ‘Zero Day’ to be so cheaply made and, frankly, boring. I usually can push through a mediocre show, but my attention kept drifting away during the first hour,” said another user.

“Don't bother with Zero Day... trust me on this. Intriguing premise and an inexplicably impressive cast completely wasted on an increasingly tedious, often nonsensical conspiracy plot. I barely made it to the end,” suggested a user.

However, a few netizens found the mini-series “solid” and thought it had an “absorbing political plot”.

“More a conspiracy thriller than a political one, Zero Day is good enough to keep watching. Bit too convoluted, with bit too many chess pieces that it ends up not as thrilling and interesting as it could have been with a tighter narrative. Still, a solid mini-series,” a user said.

“ZERO DAY is absolutely amazing with an absorbing political plot. Lesli Linka Glatter is a veteran director who projects her intentions to perfection. Robert De Niro, as we are accustomed to, appears to eat up the screen with a cast that is undoubtedly outstanding,” added another user.

Robert De Niro hesitant on future TV roles

"I don't know. It's a lot of work. It's like doing three features back to back," said Robert De Niro, the veteran American actor.

De Niro, who portrays a former US president in the series, said the preparation for the role was intense.

“It was a lot of work to learn all that and a lot of it was exposition, especially in certain parts,” he said. “There wasn't much room for paraphrasing and stuff like that, or adlibbing... But it was worth doing, you know?”

Zero Day: Cast

Other than Robert De Niro, the web series includes Jesse Plemons, Lizzy Caplan, Joan Allen, Connie Britton, Dan Stevens, McKinley Belcher III, Clark Gregg, Mozhan Navabi, and Mark Ivanir, among others.