Loved The Copenhagen Test? Check these 5 sci-fi thriller TV shows next

The Copenhagen Test is a psychological thriller that gradually escalates from a simple fear to a quiet nightmare. What if your thoughts were not yours? What if your life was a play and you were the only actor who didn't know the script? The Copenhagen Test turns the concept of surveillance inside out, suggesting that the danger is in the human mind rather than outside the world.

That is what makes the show so unsettling and addictive.

The spy show follows Alexander Hale, a man who finds out that his own mind has been made into a viewpoint for strangers without his knowledge. He can't get away from the watchers because the watchers are the ones living inside him. The show has spies, secret agencies, and advanced tech, but what it is really about trust, control, and how power changes people without them realizing it.

The Copenhagen Test is not a fast-moving thriller. It develops slow tension, one question after another, gradually expanding until Alexander's world appears to be made of glass and is a lie.

So if you liked The Copenhagen Test, what should you watch next? You should seek out TV shows that explore perception, memory, identity, and realities shaped by unseen systems.

Here are five sci-fi thriller shows that occupy the same emotional space as The Copenhagen Test. Each one delves into a different variant of the same dread. The dread of being watched. The dread of being influenced. The dread of losing your grip without realizing it.

If The Copenhagen Test made you question what is real, these five shows will keep that feeling alive.

Loved The Copenhagen Test? Check these 5 sci-fi thriller TV shows next!

#1. Black Mirror

Black Mirror is similar to a shattered mirror in a gallery. Each episode is a different reflection of modern life, slightly distorted and very unsettling. Whereas The Copenhagen Test is about one person being watched, Black Mirror takes that concept to the extreme and depicts what happens when whole communities are under continuous digital pressure.

They are separate narratives, but all of them share this same unspoken warning. Technology doesn't come with a bang. It seeps into people's lives, into their habits, into the convenience of their lives. After that, it is everywhere. Black Mirror increases its suspense by taking such things as memory, fame, dating, parenting, and privacy which are familiar to us and by softly pushing them one step beyond.

Some episodes focus on memory that cannot be forgotten. Some focus on reputations that never reset. Some focus on people being turned into content, into data, into entertainment. What connects Black Mirror to The Copenhagen Test is the idea that systems become invisible once they become normal. By the time people realize they are trapped, the walls are already built.

Black Mirror also plays with tone in interesting ways. Some stories feel like horror. Some feel like romance that went wrong. Some feel like satire that slowly turns into tragedy. This variety makes the series feel unpredictable, which keeps viewers alert and uneasy.

Where The Copenhagen Test traps one man inside a controlled reality, Black Mirror traps entire worlds inside polished systems that look safe until they are not. Both shows ask the same question in different ways. Who is really in control here.

If you enjoyed how The Copenhagen Test made you slowly distrust the environment around the main character, Black Mirror gives you dozens of versions of that same feeling, each one wearing a different face.

#2. Dark

Dark begins like a missing person story and quietly transforms into something much larger. Set in a small town, it follows families whose lives become tangled across generations through a hidden time loop. At first, everything feels local and personal. Then the story keeps pulling back until time itself becomes the main character.

Like The Copenhagen Test, Dark is built on slow discovery. It does not explain itself quickly. It lets confusion grow naturally. Fans are meant to feel lost alongside the characters. That shared disorientation becomes part of the experience.

The show treats time not as a tool but as a force that shapes people’s choices. Characters do not just travel through time. They are trapped inside it. Their attempts to fix things often become the reason things break in the first place. This creates a sense of emotional weight that lingers across seasons.

What connects Dark to The Copenhagen Test is the feeling that reality is layered. What looks simple on the surface hides a deeper structure underneath. Characters slowly realize that their freedom is smaller than they believed and that their actions are already written into a loop they cannot escape.

Dark is less about gadgets and more about destiny, grief, family, and regret. But the emotional effect is similar. It leaves you questioning whether people truly choose their paths or simply walk along tracks already laid beneath their feet.

If The Copenhagen Test made you think about how systems shape behavior, Dark makes you think about how time shapes identity.

#3. Lost

Lost is chaotic at the beginning and gradually it turns to be a story about meaning. Survivors crash onto a mysterious island and try to figure out where they were, why they were there, and what the island wanted from them. After a while, the island doesn't seem like a place but rather a kind of test.

Similar to The Copenhagen Test, Lost uses the unknown as a reflection of the inner self. Each secret uncovers something of the characters' past before the crash and their transformation due to it. The island becomes a place where the characters' guilt, faith, fear, and hope, among other things, are confronted.

What really links Lost to The Copenhagen Test was the quest for control and manipulation. The characters are not only dealing with the aftermath of an accident. They are being controlled, chosen, and placed by forces that they cannot see. As it turns out even the crash might be a deliberate act, their feeling of free will is gradually being doubted.

Lost is also a game with time, memory, and different versions of the life. It tells the story of people who think up different routes that they might have taken and the imagined lives that haunt them. These emotional layers give the show a whole lot more than just its supernatural side.

While The Copenhagen Test is about a system monitoring one man, Lost is about a system leading many people to a common fate. Both of these narratives change the concept of fate to an eerie thing rather than a reassuring one.

If you enjoyed watching Alexander Hale try to understand who is pulling the strings, Lost gives you a whole island full of strings and no easy answers.

#4. Alice in Borderland

Alice in Borderland throws its characters into a deserted city where survival is contingent upon winning lethal games. Initially, it seems like a pure action movie, but on the inside, it is about existential issues, choices, and the nature of people when they are deprived of rules.

Like The Copenhagen Test, the show places ordinary people into extraordinary systems and watches how they adapt. Some become strategic. Some become cruel. Some become selfless. The games are not just tests of skill. They are tests of character.

What connects Alice in Borderland to The Copenhagen Test is the idea that people are being observed, measured, and filtered. The characters do not know who created the games or why. They only know that their lives are being evaluated by something larger than themselves.

The show also explores how identity changes under pressure. Arisu starts as a quiet, drifting young man and slowly becomes someone capable of leadership and sacrifice. This echoes Alexander’s journey in The Copenhagen Test, where he must decide what kind of person he will be inside a system designed to control him.

Alice in Borderland feels faster and louder than The Copenhagen Test, but emotionally they share the same question. What remains of a person when the world becomes a test.

#5. Severance

Severance takes the idea of splitting work and personal life and turns it into a physical reality. Employees undergo a procedure that divides their memories. One version of them exists only at work. The other exists only outside. Neither knows what the other does.

This creates a haunting question. Who are you if half of your life is hidden from you?

Like The Copenhagen Test, Severance places control inside the body. The technology is not outside the characters. It is inside their minds. This creates a similar sense of intimacy and violation. The characters are not just being watched. They are being edited.

The show focuses heavily on routine, corporate language, and artificial happiness. This creates a strange emotional contrast where everything looks clean and calm while something deeply wrong is happening underneath.

Where The Copenhagen Test deals with surveillance and manipulation through espionage, Severance deals with it through corporate culture. Both reveal how power hides behind polite systems and friendly language.

If The Copenhagen Test made you uneasy about who owns your thoughts, Severance makes you uneasy about who owns your time.

Liking The Copenhagen Test is not just about liking a spy story. It is about liking stories that make you slow down and notice the invisible systems around people. It is about liking stories where danger does not always come from weapons or villains, but from control, observation, and quiet influence. That is the common thread running through all five shows on this list.

Each of these series takes the central idea of The Copenhagen Test and bends it in a different direction. Black Mirror turns it into a social mirror. Dark turns it into a loop of fate. Lost turns it into a question of purpose. Alice in Borderland turns it into a fight for survival. Severance turns it into a daily routine that slowly eats away at identity. The genres may look different on the surface, but underneath they all ask the same thing. Who are we when someone else is shaping the rules.

That is why these shows work so well after The Copenhagen Test. They do not just entertain. They extend the emotional space the show creates. They keep the same unease alive. They keep the same questions open. And they keep reminding us that the most powerful systems are not always loud, violent, or obvious. Sometimes they are quiet, polished, and already inside our lives before we even notice them.

What connects all of them is not technology alone, or mystery alone, or even danger alone. It is the idea that human beings are always negotiating with structures bigger than themselves.

Time, corporations, institutions, games, and even memory itself become forces that guide choices and limit freedom. These shows are not warning signs as much as they are reflections. They show how easily people adapt to cages when the cages feel normal.

That is the lasting impact of The Copenhagen Test and of the shows that follow it. They do not leave you with answers. They leave you with awareness. And sometimes that awareness is more unsettling than any twist or reveal, because it lingers long after the screen goes dark.