‘The Copenhagen Test’ TV Review: Who’s Watching Whom?
A rising intelligence analyst discovers his brain has been hacked, turning his life into a surveillance maze where allies, enemies, and even his own mind blur.
Who spies on the spy?” might as well be the mission statement of half the genre. The permutations change, but for a TV series to stretch this stuff across multiple episodes, the mystery has to multiply: not just the case, but who’s behind it, who they report to, who’s embedded, double-embedded, triple-guessing everyone else. Whether it works depends on cast chemistry, script intelligence, and sheer narrative muscle. The Copenhagen Test doesn’t quite pass. It has a reasonably fresh hook for the format; everything else lands somewhere between boilerplate and undercooked.
With veteran horror impresario James Wan as executive producer, the show stars Simu Liu (yes, Marvel’s Shang-Chi) as Alexander Hale, an analyst at an intelligence outfit nicknamed “The Orphanage”—basically internal affairs for other security agencies. Alexander is angling for a promotion to the top floor with the big bosses, while quietly managing a not-so-small issue: panic attacks and punishing, inexplicable headaches. Great timing for a career climb.
Technically, it starts earlier, with the titular test during a military training exercise meant to assess his suitability for the job. You’ll see what that entails—it ties into the show’s one genuinely nifty idea. Soon it becomes clear Alexander has been hacked. Not his phone. Not his laptop. His brain. Someone—some organization, probably—can see what he sees and track him minute by minute. He clocks it fast. So does The Orphanage, which promptly decides it has no idea whose side he’s on. What could possibly go wrong?
From there, it’s a hall-of-mirrors game of pursuit and counter-pursuit: who’s watching whom, and how a surveilled spy might outfox the watcher. The series hops back and forth in time and periodically pauses to re-explain itself, lest viewers need a whiteboard. Along the way, Alexander strikes up something with Michelle (Melissa Barrera), a bartender who may not be who she says she is. Does he know she isn’t? Does she know he knows? Exactly. The same Schrödinger’s-allies dynamic applies to his ex (Hannah Cruz), his mentor (Saul Rubinek), and his boss Peter (Brian d’Arcy James): friends, enemies, both, neither. Or—plot twist—is the problem him?
The extra layer—call it novelty, call it gimmick—is that the show doubles as a quasi-classic espionage story and a literal camera lodged inside the protagonist’s head, observed like a reality show by other characters (and, conveniently, us). As Alexander tries to figure out who hacked him and why, we track the ups and downs of his personal and professional life, which, unfortunately, aren’t nearly as revealing as the premise suggests.
The Copenhagen Test would almost certainly play better as a movie—hardly a radical claim at this point—and it finds its strongest thread in Alexander’s push-pull with Michelle and his tense sparring with Peter and other Orphanage suits. The main drag is visual: limp action staging, aggressively TV-ish aesthetics, and a lack of the polish and elegance this kind of story needs to sell its own cleverness. Gradually, the initial intrigue thins out—if not evaporates, then settles into predictability—leaving a serviceable spy yarn that holds your attention well enough and exits your memory just as efficiently.
