Did you know The Copenhagen Test was inspired by this classic Jim Carrey film? Details explored 

Peacock's The Copenhagen Test takes a few pages out of a classic Jim Carrey film, as series creator Thomas Brandon has admitted, making the show's setup similar to what Carrey's film explored years ago. In an interview with ScreenRant, Brandon revealed how the idea of a man slowly realizing his entire reality might be staged was taken from The Truman Show, which toyed with the exact same idea of a distorted reality.

Speaking to the outlet, Brandon talked about the show's story and said,

"The Truman Show is one of my favorite movies. When I was first realizing that this story I wanted to tell was a little sci-fi about a guy, his eyes and ears getting hacked, would meld perfectly with my deep John le Carré love of spy stories, and then I realized the John le Carré thing ever is if you discover a hack, you wouldn't get rid of it. That's a line to the enemy. So in a very smart way, you have to keep the hack going. And that meant this guy had to pretend he didn't know. That meant this orphanage had to build a fake world around him."

He then added how he realized this idea was pretty similar to Carrey's film, as he continued,

"I looked up and realized we're talking about a Truman Show world. We're talking about a world where this guy does not know what's real or what's not."

What is The Copenhagen Test about?

The Copenhagen Test is a slick, paranoia-soaked espionage thriller that messes with your head on purpose and mostly gets away with it. The series follows Alexander Hale, played by Simu Liu, a former special forces sniper whose life quietly derails after a mission in Belarus goes wrong. Three years later, he is stuck behind a desk at The Orphanage, a shadowy internal watchdog agency that keeps tabs on other intelligence departments.

The official synopsis of the show adds,

"Keeping the fiction alive that he's unaware of the hack, he works with his agency to hunt those responsible, even as The Orphanage builds a fake world around him, assigning him a new "girlfriend," promoting him to a new dangerous mission and sending him down a rabbit hole where it's not clear what's real and what's fake in his own life. When the lines begin to blur, Alexander is forced to take control of his own destiny and discover where his true allegiance lies."

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With surveillance everywhere and trust nowhere, the show leans hard into moral gray zones, identity anxiety, and the terrifying idea that your own mind might not be private anymore.

All eight episodes of The Copenhagen Test are available to stream on Peacock, where it has received mostly positive reviews.

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