A lot of fuss was made over the tech-bro chief executives at Donald Trump’s inauguration in January. Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and, of course, the President’s new head of the Department of Government Efficiency and Twitter/X CEO Elon Musk all pledged their allegiance to America’s new era. But there were two tech giants missing: Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters.
You might take this as a sign your favourite streaming service is refusing to bend the knee to the US’s new regime. Not quite. Reports suggest Sarandos visited Trump in private at his Mar-a-Lago pile just before last Christmas. Perhaps it didn’t go well, hence the lack of Netflix representation at the inauguration – after all, his fellow tech bosses also made the pilgrimage to Florida around the same time. It’s unlikely we’ll ever know what really happened in those meetings.
One thing is certain: Netflix is terrified of being political. Perhaps with good reason. When Reed Hastings, co-founder of the streamer and head of the board of directors, donated $7m (£5,545,652.60) to Kamala Harris’s campaign last summer, subscription cancellations spiked at a rate of 2.8 per cent. Proof that putting their ball in anyone’s court – Democrat or Republican – risks alienating subscribers. It’s a game they can’t – and won’t – play.
Need more evidence? Look no further than Netflix’s content. Zero Day, currently the streamer’s second most-watched programme in the UK, is ostensibly a political thriller with the great Robert de Niro cast as an ex-President, Mullen.
He’s tasked with overseeing a new commission set up to find the culprits of a deadly cyber-attack, chosen because he is trusted implicitly and respected by the American people. He is, however, never depicted as either Republican or Democrat – something you’d imagine might be important when creating a fully fleshed-out character who we’re supposed to believe once ran the country.
This hasn’t gone unnoticed. Almost every review of Zero Day pointed to Mullen’s painfully centrist point of view as a negative and journalists have been stumped by Netflix’s request to not ask De Niro any political questions. This is a man who used to publicly call Trump a “pig” before realising that would be “a disservice to pigs”.
It’s not the first time Netflix has swerved giving its so-called political thrillers a party-politics angle. The Diplomat has striking parallels to real US politics, particularly the Biden-Harris administration, but takes great care to never ascribe a party to the titular diplomat, Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), and while The Recruit and The Night Agent both meddle in international politics, we have no inkling as to what specific ideology the central spies are risking their lives for.
When questioned about why Zero Day is so apolitical, De Niro’s co-star Jesse Plemons argued that assigning a party to Mullen would distract us from the story. “When you do get into the specifics of a political party, it gives you an out immediately as a viewer to either say ‘I’m for this person’ or ‘I’m against them.’” he told The Times. “Something disengages as you’re watching. We don’t really need any more of that.”
But there are plenty of fictional politicians whose party affiliation has only served to make them more interesting, likeable and realistic. The West Wing’s Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen) was a Democrat and much of the Golden Globe, Emmy-winning drama spun from his clashes with a Republican congress. The BBC’s Bodyguard cast Keeley Hawes as the Tory Home Secretary. Made before Netflix became the powerhouse is it today, House of Cards’ President Frank Underwood was merciless, murderous, self-serving – and a Democrat.
We live in a different and more polarised world than when those programmes first aired. Netflix is now worried that any left-wing Netflix subscribers won’t watch a programme with a sympathetic right-wing hero, and vice-versa. Maybe they’re right, but I’d like to think we’re smarter than that. We don’t have to agree with the policies of a fictional politician to see that they make good television. Netflix should be bold enough to let us make our own minds up.
TV is at its best when it reflects the world around us. Grounding a story like Zero Day in reality would make it a richer, more urgent story. It’s hard to care about the American citizens of this false world when they are flattened to an apolitical, unthinking mass.
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