LOS ANGELES — Political thrillers have been a staple of popular culture since the 1960s, when the Cold War threw conspiracy theory-loving writers into overdrive, and television and film are no exception.

This year, however, has seen a marked abundance of stories dealing with government scheming, corruption, incompetence and general mayhem. (Make of that what you will.) Some have given contemporary resonance to universal classics — assassination, mass casualty events, global annihilation — while others have taken veiled but obvious aim at recent or current leaders and events.

Landing at a time when conspiracy theories, nationalism and charges of treason have become the lingua franca of politics and people are regularly shoved into unmarked cars by ICE agents, some of the plotlines seem less far-fetched than in other eras. But the beauty of the political thriller is that there's almost always someone able to fight back and ensure that justice prevails.

Here are a few that stood out.

'Zero Day' (Netflix)

In his first venture into television, Robert De Niro plays one-term former President George Mullen who is pulled out of retirement after a worldwide cyberattack kills millions. Granted every nonconstitutional power imaginable, he is tasked with finding the perpetrators before they follow through on their threatened second attack. The nonpartisan, antiextremist message is muddy if essentially important, but with De Niro heading a stellar cast that includes Joan Allen, Jesse Plemons, Angela Bassett, Connie Britton, Gaby Hoffmann, Matthew Modine and Bill Camp playing all manner of steely D.C. power players, the attempt to generalize what should be specific is easy to forgive.

'Paradise' (Hulu)

After Special Agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) finds the murdered body of U.S. President (and good friend) Cal Bradford (James Marsden), uncovering the assassin is the least of his problems. What appears to be an idyllic community is in fact a hidden bunker where the elite have sheltered since a global disaster had ended life as we know it. Full of plot twists that examine the unhealthy influence of tech mavericks (cough, cough) as well as the more obvious "we live in a bunker" issues, the first season of "Paradise" proves once again that the personal is the political.

'The Diplomat' (Netflix)

Since the hit show's debut in 2023, Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) has complained about the non-front-line nature of her job as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, a role she reluctantly accepted, while somehow making it one of the most influential roles in world politics. Oh the plots she and her on-again/off-again husband Hal (Rufus Sewell) have uncovered while Kate attempts to keep that "very special relationship" alive and insist that she not be chosen to replace Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney). Season 3, which debuted in October, set the bar even higher. Penn is now president, and she is no Jed Bartlet (though it's hard not to root for a Janney presidency especially since Bradley Whitford plays her spouse). But then neither is Kate; she has a good enough moral sense to pass as a hero, but the exquisite tension of "The Diplomat" is almost always between the lesser of two evils.

'A House of Dynamite' (Netflix)

Kathryn Bigelow's pre-apocalyptic thriller is old-school in its concerns — nuclear annihilation — and modern in its unwillingness to offer hope. A nuclear missile has been launched by someone from the Pacific and is headed for Chicago. A new American president (Idris Elba) and his reassuringly competent government must decide how to respond. The absence of a good choice underlines the essential weakness of a world armed with advanced weaponry in the same way "War Games" did in 1983; only this time it's too late to teach the computer that there is no winning a nuclear war.

'Hostage' (Netflix)

When the husband of Prime Minister Abigail Dalton (Suranne Jones) is kidnapped in French Guinea, the ransom demand is that Dalton resign. Already under fire for cutting the military without delivering on her promise to solve the National Health Service crisis, the liberal Dalton was already preparing to ask less-than-liberal French President Vivienne Toussaint (Julie Delpy) to provide the U.K. the pharmaceuticals it needs; now Dalton needs the French military to help find her husband. As everyone races to save her husband, and figure out who took him and why, Dalton must get past her contempt for Toussaint's recent courting of the French alt-right to find common ground.

'G20' (Prime Video)

Hoping to make her mark at the G20 convention, U.S. President Danielle Sutton (Viola Davis) is instead threatened by mercenaries. Led by a disaffected corporal who never liked Sutton and who dreams of collapsing the crypto-economy to his financial benefit, the group attempt to take her and the First Family hostage. He just didn't count on the first Black female president's ability to fight back.

'Death by Lightning' (Netflix)

When President James Garfield was shot on July 2, 1881, a mere four months into his presidency, it was not because he supported civil rights and universal education or had taken steps to combat corruption in the civil service. Instead, the man who shot him, Charles J. Guiteau, was acting out of a deluded sense of personal grievance and a desire for fame. "Death By Lightning" is the tale of the two men — Garfield (Michael Shannon) a progressive and honorable Civil War hero who was drafted, against his will, to run for president and Guiteau (Matthew MacFadyen) a narcissistic wastrel who believes the world is conspiring to keep him from fortune and fame. That the second could end the life of the first (with more than a little help from the science-skeptical doctor who attended Garfield) is a tragedy of epic proportions — what might American history, and its present, look like if Garfield had completed even one term as president?

'The Night Agent' (Netflix)

After single-handedly saving a train filled with people from a bomb, FBI Agent Peter Sutherland (Gabriel Basso) is demoted to the (fictional) Night Action desk, which is, essentially, an agents hotline that never rings. Until, of course, it does and Sutherland is thrown into a murder and corruption plot that goes straight to the White House (Season 1) and Middle Eastern terrorism (in Season 2, which premiered in January.)

'The Handmaid's Tale' (Hulu)

As dystopian as political thrillers get, the series based on Margaret Atwood's short but powerful novel filled in the backstory and workings of the militaristic fascist government that created the theocratic Gilead. And in its final season, "The Handmaid's Tale" planted the seeds of that government's fall: pressures from without — including from June (Elisabeth Moss) and the Mayday operation — and within. The defection of Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) and Commander Joseph (Bradley Whitford) underlined the essential flaw of fascism: Fear as a motivating force can only work for so long.

'Down Cemetery Road' (Apple TV)

The death of a neighbor in a mysterious house fire, and the subsequent disappearance of her young daughter, forces art conservationist Sarah Trafford (Ruth Wilson) to hire Oxford private investigator Joe Silvermann (Adam Godley). When he dies, and his death is ruled suicide, his partner and wife, Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson), gets involved, determined to unearth a plot that involves the British Ministry of Defense. Which is just as much twisty, turny, multiple-cover-up fun as it sounds.

©2025 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.