Reel Perspectives Review: The Copenhagen Test — "Welcome to the Orphanage?"
- The Real Perspectives
- Dec 27, 2025
- 4 min read
Reel Perspectives
December 27, 2025
Episode one introduces a spy thriller where loyalty comes with an asterisk and surveillance isn’t evenly distributed.
The Copenhagen Test: Loyalty Under Surveillance
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Who watches the watchmen?
Peacock’s The Copenhagen Test builds its entire premise around that question—and then immediately answers it with: apparently, everyone, especially if you’re a first-generation Chinese-American man already used to being watched a little harder than most.
The series, which premiered on Peacock on December 27 and will carry 8 episodes, stars Simu Liu as Alexander Hale, an intelligence analyst at The Orphanage, a clandestine agency tasked with surveilling the U.S. intelligence community. Three years after a field mission in Belarus goes catastrophically wrong, Alexander is relegated to basement desk duty, haunted by migraines, PTSD, and the unspoken suspicion that loyalty—especially his—comes with an asterisk, renewable and always subject to audit.
The premiere wastes no time grounding that suspicion. In a Belarus flashback, Alexander is forced into an impossible choice: one seat on a helicopter, two hostages. He’s ordered to prioritize an American. He chooses a child instead. That decision—ethical, humane, and quietly career-ending—becomes the invisible stain on his record, the moment that defines just how much trust the system will ever afford him. (Spoiler: not much.)
Back in the present, Alexander wants “upstairs”—a return to fieldwork, status, and purpose. Or at the very least, a badge that lets him ride the good elevator. It’s a familiar aspiration for anyone who’s ever felt boxed in by institutional ceilings, but it lands with particular weight for immigrant kids raised on the idea that excellence isn’t optional, it’s survival. A FaceTime call with his parents underscores that tension perfectly: the tightrope between “make us proud” and “please don’t attract attention.”
On paper, Alexander’s life is improving. He’s flirting with Michelle (a magnetic Melissa Barrera), navigating awkward run-ins with his ex-fiancée, Dr. Rachel Kasperian (Hannah Cruz), and finally lands the promotion he’s been chasing.
In reality? The paper is lying.
Agents are being assassinated overseas. Assets are compromised. And somehow, the common thread runs through Alexander’s analysis. Cue the audit. Cue the paranoia. Cue the HR meeting that somehow feels like an interrogation. Cue the age-old spy-thriller question: if everyone’s being watched, who gets presumed guilty first?
Here’s where The Copenhagen Test makes its boldest—and messiest—move. Alexander discovers the source of his migraines isn’t stress; it’s surveillance. His brain has been hacked. Someone can see everything he sees and hear everything he hears. No curtains. No incognito mode. The watcher has become the ultimate open window.
Instead of burning him outright, Orphanage leadership—Peter Moira (a quietly menacing, impressively bearded Brian D’Arcy James) and founder St. George (Kathleen Chalfant)—decide to weaponize him. Alexander becomes bait, monitored closely by handler Samantha Parker (Sinclair Daniel), who studies his reactions like a Truman Show audition nobody signed up for and definitely didn’t get paid for.
Blink wrong, and it’s Cardi B levels of suspicious.
Conceptually, it’s sharp. Thematically, it’s loaded. The show wants to interrogate xenophobia, birthright citizenship, and the exhausting reality of having to perform patriotism just to stay alive in institutional spaces. When Alexander hesitates, he’s suspect. When he complies, he’s expendable. Loyalty is never enough—it has to be constantly proven, preferably on demand.
Where the premiere stumbles is in execution. Created by Thomas Brandon and executive produced by James Wan, the episode is dense to a fault. Characters repeatedly explain the premise, delivering monologues that feel more like classified PowerPoint presentations than dialogue. For a show obsessed with twists, it sometimes undercuts its own tension by over-clarifying the mystery—as if worried the audience blinked and missed the paranoia memo.
Still, the cast does a lot of heavy lifting. Liu brings warmth and quiet interiority to a protagonist who could easily read as too virtuous on the page. He makes Alexander’s restraint feel intentional and relatable, not bland. Barrera, meanwhile, is a standout. Michelle is a question mark in human form—charming, unreadable, and absolutely not here by accident—and Barrera plays her like someone always holding one card back.
The premiere sets the tone clearly. The Copenhagen Test wants to be an edge-of-your-seat paranoia thriller, but it’s most compelling when it slows down and lets its identity politics breathe. Its central idea—that surveillance isn’t neutral and suspicion isn’t evenly distributed—hits hardest for viewers who already know what it feels like to be watched more closely, judged more harshly, and forgiven less often.
The question isn’t just who’s watching Alexander Hale. It’s who’s allowed to survive being watched—and who was never presumed innocent to begin with.
And that’s a test not everyone gets to pass.
✏️ Inside the Writer’s Room ✏️
Created by Thomas Brandon, The Copenhagen Test reflects a writer deeply fluent in genre storytelling and institutional power dynamics. Brandon rose to Supervising Producer on The CW’s Legacies, where he wrote or co-wrote 18 episodes across four seasons and produced 15 of them on the ground in Atlanta. His résumé spans original pilots developed with Peacock, Paramount+, ABC, CBS, Warner Bros., and Amblin, signaling an ease with high-concept premises and morally murky worlds. He also brings a strong theater background—his play Pocket Universe appeared at the Ashland New Play Festival and won the Producer’s Encore Award at the Hollywood Fringe—which helps explain the series’ interest in dialogue-driven tension and characters performing loyalty under pressure. That blend of TV scale and stage intimacy makes Brandon a fitting architect for a show obsessed with surveillance, trust, and who gets written off before they ever speak.
🎓 Dat Reel Rating: 6.5 out of 10 Incognito Modes 🎓 Slick performances and a compelling central metaphor keep the premiere engaging, but heavy exposition and overexplained twists dull its impact. The Copenhagen Test is strongest when it trusts its themes of surveillance and identity—and weakest when it insists on explaining them.
All episodes of The Copenhagen Test are streaming now on Peacock.
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