(L-R): Melissa Barrera as Michelle and Simu Liu as Alexander in The Copenhagen Test Season 1. Photo courtesy of Peacock
In a digital day and age, everything isn’t as it seems, which seems to be the concept that’s envisioned in Peacock’s upcoming series, The Copenhagen Test. The series, set in a near-modern day dystopia, sees first-generation Chinese-American intelligence analyst Alexander Hale (Simu Liu) getting his mind, enhanced by neural technology, hacked. Now, he’s on a mission to figure out who’s causing all of this while proving his loyalties. The series also stars Melissa Barrera, Sinclair Daniel, Brian D’Arcy James, Mark O’Brien, and Kathleen Chalfant.
Given this in-depth sci-fi idea, there are only so many ways that it can be executed. Co-showrunners Thomas Brandon and Jennifer Yale, of Legacies and Outlander fame respectively, shared some insightful details about the series’ themes, production choices, and twisting narrative turns at NYCC 2025.
Check out our conversational highlights here!
Brandon talked about how he and Yale came up with the technology in The Copenhagen Test and inspired the show’s own devices of importance: “Right now, there is something called neural dust that little nanites are working on, but they’re doing it specifically in the medical field,” Brandon recalled. “They’re trying to figure out if they can find a way to communicate with people that are in comas.”
“This is where the show came from,” Brandon added. “A lot of times the leaps forward we have in technology are used by the defense services or the clandestine services first, but we almost never see that.”
“My wife’s laptop had just been hacked by ransomware,” Brandon recalled. “They wanted like 500 bitcoin or something to unlock this. Then, I was thinking about, ‘If I’m worried about that, what’s five minutes in the future?’”
“I thought about somebody inside an intelligence service and then, because I’m a fan of the ‘90s and The Truman Show, and also the novels of Jean Le Carre, it’s not just enough to have a guy who’s hacked, and what I thought was so interesting is him being able to signal, ‘It’s me!’”
Yale spoke more about the musical inspirations that led to the right ideas for the score behind The Copenhagen Test, which was done by Industry’s Nathan McKay: “It was so interesting what he would bring to each one of our scenes and the propulsive energy, and at the same time, create an element for one of our characters that would see through and that would almost lead to what the scene was supposed to do.”
Brandon also spoke about how he and Yale sought to maintain the tonal balance that The Copenhagen Test has, given how it handles multiple genres: “I think the question of most spy shows is always, ‘Who do you trust? What we said as a step forward for our show is, the question is not just who do you trust, the question is, ‘How do you know?’”
“What we did with a lot of our brilliant DPs and our sets is, it was a little brighter than the average spy show,” Brandon continued. “There’s this interesting, weary optimism that comes from these career bureaucrats who are realizing, ‘Oh, we have a chance to do something extraordinary here.’”
“It was our mission to make it where the audience was with Alexander,” Yale added. “There were times that they were ahead of him and there were times that he was ahead of them, but the audience was with him and to always be questioning whether it was real or not and whether you could trust yourself or not.”
Brandon also went into the complexities of he and Yale represented The Copenhagen Test’s twisting perspective from both a psychological and cinematographic standpoint.
“A lot of why you keep getting fooled is because our brains are wired to think of things as stories and narratives and life is not a story,” Brandon noted. “That’s really kind of like in the essence of the show, Alexander is using his eyes and ears to tell a story to whoever is watching.”
“Most of the time in TV and film, they just use like a fish eye lens to say this is a point of view, which is very video gamey,” Brandon continued. “We tried to figure out what it actually looks like, how do we mimic that instead of doing something that is just the exception of, ‘This is the point of view.’ We had to start from scratch.”
“When you’re watching through Alexander’s eyes, you see a little bit of the form of his nose and the way that your eyes blink,” Yale recalled. “We spent over a year trying to perfect what that would actually be so that you could tell the difference.”
One comparison that could be made about the idea about The Copenhagen Test is that fear of technological evolution, which is similar to another film: 2018’s Upgrade. Brandon spoke more about the thematic connection between both projects.
“One of the similarities is that Upgrade is similarly set five minutes in the future, where it still feels like our world, but there’s a few things that are different,” Brandon said. “One of the reasons I love that is, there’s a great quote: ‘It’s the job of the science fiction writer not to envision the future car but the future traffic jam.’”
“You don’t make a movie about, ‘And now there’s androids that are just like people,’” Brandon added. “You make a movie about, ‘But what if you couldn’t tell the difference and you needed a Blade Runner to go hunt them down?’ That’s why I think actually Black Mirror is one of the best titles I’ve ever heard of because that’s what technology is: it’s a mirror that reflects back to us.”
“It feels like it’s about, ‘That’s about other people in the science fiction espionage world,’ and then you discover, ‘This is about me. This is about where we are as a country. This is about what we want in our life.’”
The Copenhagen Test premieres on Saturday, December 27, on Peacock.
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Christopher Gallardo is a freelance entertainment writer and critic. While not running The Reel Roller, Chris can be found writing reviews and breakdowns on all things films and TV. Outside of entertainment writing, he’s currently taking classes for a Bachelor’s of Science with a minor in Digital Media & Journalism. Plus, he loves Percy Jackson, animated films and shows, and Fallout! Follow Christopher on Instagram & X.