What’s worse than luring Robert De Niro to Netflix for a boring, soulless and asinine political thriller? Also luring Angela Bassett, Connie Britton, Jesse Plemons, Dan Stevens, Lizzy Caplan, Joan Allen, Matthew Modine and Bill Camp to the underwhelming party.

That event is Netflix’s six-episode limited series “Zero Day” (now streaming, ★ out of four), a ham-handed imagination of the U.S. in the middle of a crisis that understands very little about how Americans respond to crises. Created by Eric Newman (“Griselda”), former NBC News chief Noah Oppenheim and New York Times correspondent Michael Schmidt, the series wastes its starry cast and offers a painfully inaccurate portrayal of modern politics in a convoluted conspiracy thriller that lacks any real thrills.

De Niro may bring gravitas and his Oscar-winning talents to his first American series, but his gravelly voice and hard stares can’t save something that’s already broken. The veteran actor, 81, plays George Mullen, a former president beloved by the public and both political parties (sure, OK) living in cushy retirement but struggling to confront personal demons and write a promised memoir. He’s jolted out of his quiet life when a cyberattack stops all power and internet systems for one minute, causing thousands of deaths from train derailments, plane crashes and other disasters. Mullen is drafted by the current president, Evelyn Mitchell (Bassett), to lead a constitutionally questionable commission dedicated to finding the perpetrators of Zero Day, as the attack becomes known.

Mullen is given wide, dictator-like powers that Congress and the president were seemingly overjoyed to hand over to the commission. The only person who seems appropriately upset about the whole thing is Mullen’s daughter Alex (Caplan), a congresswoman who conveniently becomes chair of the oversight committee monitoring Mullen’s work.

The other excellent actors flit in and out as nonsensical characters: Britton plays Valerie Whitesell, Mullen’s former chief of staff and lover (an insult to her, to be honest; there is a 24-year age difference between the actors). Plemons plays Mullen’s adviser Roger Carlson, who earns a role in the super-sensitive commission despite a history of drug use and criminal investigations. Stevens plays a fringe internet personality that sure looks and sounds like many a YouTuber or cable news host you may have seen before. Modine rounds out the cast of caricatures as the greasy Speaker of the House, barely adjusting his mustache-twirling persona from “Stranger Things.”

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Most of the cast does what they can with the material they’re given (though Britton and Bassett somewhat phone it in), but “Zero” fundamentally lacks meaningful stakes and sympathetic characters. Its villains are cardboard cutouts, its heroes are unappealing and each scene is laced with logical fallacies. The way the public responds to the cyberattack is nearly opposite the real-life reaction to crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and the 9/11 attacks, fighting and rioting after the tragedy but then coming together in unity just as the politicians are at each others’ throats. Although the words “Democrat” and “Republican” are never used, the show sometimes ascribes characters as “right” or “left,” yet their actions don’t correspond to those actual political ideologies.

This fundamental lack of logic trickles down to even the smallest moments: Alex seems to have no staff members in her congressional office; Roger is connected to every bad guy and red herring possible; and the commission only pursues investigative leads that Mullen personally develops. Mullen travels by helicopter every time he leaves his upstate New York house, except for the moment the writers want to put his life in danger by having him drive through a crowd of protestors. Guess the helicopter was out of gas that day. They’re little things, but little annoyances add up.

The series desperately needed both exposition and character development at its beginning, but instead, it plows ahead with the plot first, leaving fuzzy explanations for later. By the time six episodes have crawled by, you’ll still be scratching your head at the harebrained narrative, and there’s no incentive to understand it anyway because you won’t care about a single character. The resolution to the big mystery is as unsatisfying as every step along the way.

It’s dangerous putting the word “zero” in your title because all I can think of is that I have zero interest in this story, zero thought about it after I’ve watched it and zero recommendations for anyone else to tune in.