The State of the Political Thriller Miniseries
The definitive review of all the TV shows that Real Haters watched over spring break.
One thing about me is that I love a political thriller. Over spring break, freed from the shackles of Thesising (a verb) I got to catch up on the latest television on various streaming services. So — humor me; today we’re doing a self-indulgent piece about a topic I enjoy.
This piece contains spoilers for Zero Day and Paradise, which you should not watch; it does not contain spoilers for The Residence, which you should watch.
Zero Day (Netflix)
The year is 2023-ish. Totally-not-Kamala Harris (Angela Bassett) is in the White House. Well-liked former President George Mullen (inexplicably, Robert De Niro in his television debut) who declined to run for a second term following the death of his son from a drug overdose, is living a peaceful life on his upstate New York estate as he tries to finish his long-awaited memoir. Life is good. But when a cyberattack cripples America and leaves a cryptic warning, that “this will happen again,” the White House calls in Mullen to chair the “Zero Day Commission” to bring the perpetrators to justice. While dodging an apparent psychological weapon and dealing with his strained relationship with his daughter Alexandra (Lizzie Caplan), a progressive congresswoman, Mullen uncovers a conspiracy that has reached the highest offices in the federal government.
Zero Day dares to ask the big questions about our national psyche. Unfortunately, those questions are, “What if AOC were a nepo baby?” “What role would make Jesse Plemons go on Ozempic?” “What if Nepo Baby AOC teamed up with Mike Johnson to implement Full Communism by doing domestic terrorism?” “What if Joe Biden was actually just suffering from Havana Syndrome?” and, “Which Netflix executive saw De Niro do a hit-and-run?”
Thrillers are supposed to have twists. The show has no twists. There are also no stakes, per se: no character loses anything in the attacks that meaningfully motivates them; the entire show is establishing shots of New York City and Washington, D.C. (characters tend to move between the two locations in minutes) followed by De Niro reacting to things. Nor does the show want to commit to a substantive political standpoint, so it mix-and-matches characters and ideologies. The Tucker Carlson stand-in is, randomly, a leftist.
If you absolutely must watch Zero Day, I recommend treating it like the prestige television that it wants to be. Ooh and ahh at the expansive budget; gasp at the shots of the Zero Day Commission’s gigantic official seal being moved on and off the wall. Annoy your friends by talking about how De Niro should submit the episode for Emmy consideration.
How I would script doctor Zero Day:
George Mullen is a retired ex-president living in Northern Virginia. Mullen lost his 2004 re-election campaign after it was revealed that he fathered a child with his then-White House Chief of Staff,1 and is estranged from his daughter, a congresswoman named literally anything other than “Alexandra.” After a shocking cyberattack kills thousands of Americans, including not-Alexandra’s boyfriend/fiance/husband/IDK, an impromptu act of heroism by Mullen goes viral. President Angela Bassett taps him to chair a 9/11-style commission. Simultaneously, not-Alexandra, shocked and grieving, angles for a seat on the Congressional investigative committee.
While Mullen initially approaches his appointment as a civic obligation, it quickly becomes clear that he is in deep over his head. He suffers from apparent bouts of memory loss, haunted by the song that was playing when he discovered his son’s body; technological advancements and increasing polarization mean that he is no longer operating in the same political environment that he remembers. Mullen lashes out, ordering the commission to carry out civil rights violations, including torture and the suspension of habeas corpus, to find the perpetrators. Meanwhile, not-Alexandra comes into conflict with her father, and it is revealed that her grief is actually guilt about her role in the attack. Or something. I don’t actually care.
Robert De Niro, please do another, better, television show. You can’t let this be your legacy.
Paradise (Hulu)
Probably the most popular of the three, Paradise is fun by virtue of its insanity. Following an unspecified series of climate disasters, the remnants of the U.S. population — approximately 25,000 people, we’re told — live in a (ahem) paradisical underground city ruled by a benevolent dictatorship of a federal Executive Branch advised by a cabal of billionaires. Xavier Collins (a gratuitously shredded Sterling K. Brown) is the Secret Service agent-in-charge protecting President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) who — whoops! — is murdered immediately following a drunken confrontation with Xavier.
To find the truth behind Cal’s murder, Xavier has to navigate the dangerous secrets hidden by his best friend Billy (secretly an assassin), the beautiful Secret Service agent Jane (Billy’s girlfriend; a super-secret assassin), the beautiful Secret Service manager Robinson (secretly carrying on an affair with Cal), the beautiful and mysterious psychologist Gabriela, and the beautiful, conniving billionaire oligarch Sinatra. It’s a beautiful bunker full of beautiful people, okay?
“Paradise,” we are told, is a Los Angeles suburb. (Or maybe it was just “paradise” for Hulu to film a political thriller entirely set in Santa Clarita.) But that’s not to say that the show has anything meaningful to say about the nature of American suburbia — or the class politics of continued income inequality in the apocalypse, or the bona-fide oligarchy governing the underground city of Paradise.
Nor is this to say that I disliked Paradise (the show). I just found it very strange. It feels like a network television show from the early 2010s, that just so happens to be striving to be a prestige series on a streaming service. It doesn’t make much sense. Everyone is hot, I guess. That might be the main takeaway.
Script Doctor Pitch:
One gets the impression that the entire purpose of setting Paradise in a sunny, beautiful suburb was to build up to the big twist at the end of the first episode: that the sunny, beautiful suburb is the promised underground bunker. Quite frankly, the idea isn’t worth basing the entire show around. Instead, set the series at the Raven Rock Mountain Complex in Pennsylvania, the real-life disaster evacuation site for the federal government. You can recoup Sterling K. Brown’s salary by just filming in a soundstage.
Wait, sorry — you wanted a murder mystery starring an ultra-charming Black lead opposite a president? What you’re actually looking for is…
The Residence (Netflix)
I’m biased towards The Residence — in 2023, I interviewed Kate Andersen Brower, the author of the nonfiction book The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House, for an HPR article on the subject. I am a diehard Kate Brower stan; I have her entire bibliography on my bookshelf at home. And it’s possible that never in the entire history of television has a show been so micro-targeted at my specific interests. In my junior year, I wrote a novel manuscript set in the White House, which never quite made it off the ground, and I don’t have any resentment about, no sir.
Anyway. It’s the night of a high-stakes state dinner in honor of the Prime Minister of Australia, and White House Chief Usher A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito, whose agent needs to branch out) just turned up dead of an apparent suicide. The D.C. police chief calls in Detective Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba, in great outfits and even better form), who defies the demands of the president’s advisors by ruling Wynter’s death a murder. Cupp’s twelve-hour overnight investigation — colorfully narrated through an after-the-fact Senate hearing chaired by Al Franken (no, seriously, Al Franken) and totally-not-Marjorie Taylor Greene (Eliza Coupe) — sends her on an adventure to discover the many secrets of the White House’s career staff.
The Residence is a no-frills Knives Out derivative, satirizing a snooty elite in murder-mystery form while running back the greatest hits of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. A socialite couple crashes the party, a real incident that happened under the Obama administration. The president is obsessed with his shower pressure, a real habit of Lyndon Johnson’s. The show makes full use of a note-perfect White House set, right down to the hidden staircases and plot-significant linen closets.2 But unlike Zero Day or Paradise, it is a completely delightful seven hours of fun that makes no pretenses about being Serious Television.
Script Doctor Pitch:
The husband should have done it. (Hey — I said I wouldn’t spoil how it ended, not how it didn’t end.) The president’s husband, Elliot Morgan (Barrett Foa), for whom the casting directors were apparently given the directive of “JFK if he slayed,” just kind of lingers in the background as a lightly feckless ghost for the entire show. In fact, he is so completely absentee — apparently disinterested in the social obligations of his role; even when a random detail about the Morgans’ dog seemed to imply that he could have been present for the murder — that I thought the inevitable twist might reveal that he was actually a cold-blooded political animal who killed Wynter to cover up the administration’s unsavory North Korea deal. He could even frame the canonical culprit, if you were feeling fancy.
Alternatively, Brower’s book goes into detail about the security risks posed by the contracted part-time workers who staff state dinners. One character even speculates aloud that plot-significant character is a contractor posing as a guest. By the midpoint of the show, I was talking my friends’ ears off about how certain I was that it would be the final twist — and felt that this would be a disappointment, given that I employed the same prospective plot point in my own manuscript.
There’s really not much to improve on, though. The Residence is a hoot. I would watch a multi-season show about Cordelia Cupp solving murders in international heads of state’s residences. Let’s kill a Buckingham Palace footman and a secretary at the Japanese Imperial Household Agency next!
An actual third-act plot point that I spared you from in my initial recap.
The only inconsistency with the real-life White House that I noted was the absence of two other centrally located bedrooms on the second floor, which often house the president’s children, even though there’s a surprising amount of on-screen discussion about room allocation. An earlier version of the script might have meant for the Morgans to have young children, but could have been cut for time. I told you — I’m a real nerd about this stuff!