There have been so many spy shows that have come and gone, just within the past year. The Agency (2024) on Paramount+ wrapped up its first season in early 2025. The Recruit (2022) and The Night Agent (2023) both aired their second seasons on Netflix in 2025. Slow Horses (2022) aired its fifth season in 2025. One could argue that Amazon's The Terminal List: Dark Wolf (2025) was also a series that involved espionage and international affairs that were often covert. The Diplomat (2023) on Netflix could also be put in that bucket, even though espionage was not its main focus. A lot of the drama from the series sprang from covert international activities and in early 2026, Amazon resurrected the BBC One series The Night Manager (2016) after a nearly decade-long hiatus. This one, created by Thomas Brandon (Legacies) and executive produced by James Wan (Aquaman and The Conjuring), will likely get lost in the shuffle of all those shows, but this one stands out from the pack because it's one of the few to incorporate a science-fiction element or a high-concept technology idea into its narrative.
Simu Liu (Barbie and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) stars as Alexander Hale, a Chinese-American military veteran. He served in the U.S. Army Special Forces. He specifically worked as a sniper who provided cover for other soldiers who conducted rescue missions. His last mission was in Belarus, which is a European country on the Russian border, just north of Ukraine. He was conducting a rescue mission of hostages. He was trying to get a little boy who wasn't American to a helicopter for extraction when a young American woman asked him for help, but there was only one free seat on the helicopter. Alexander had to make a choice of whether to save the non-American child or the American woman. This choice would come to be known as Alexander's "Copenhagen Test." It's a test of loyalty and of whether one can trust that a soldier will support his country and its citizens or a foreign entity.
Sinclair Daniel (The Other Black Girl) co-stars as Samantha Parker, a woman who works for an organization known as "The Orphanage." This organization is a watchdog for all of the other U.S. intelligence agencies like the CIA, NSA and FBI. When a series of operations go wrong, Parker and her bosses believe that there is a leak in The Orphanage. It's determined that all three of the operations that went wrong can be linked to Alexander who has worked as an analyst for The Orphanage for three years. Parker's job becomes to study Alexander and figure out if he can be trusted and if he's a traitor to the U.S. or not. How she does so is by orchestrating Copenhagen Tests, which she monitors 24/7. She basically manipulates him with choices to see if he'll leak information or not, if he'll betray the country or not.
However, things take a turn when Alexander starts having medical problems. Specifically, he has headaches and he's not sure what's causing them. Eventually, he learns that he himself has been hacked or hijacked using advanced technology that someone put inside of him. It's nanotechnology that broadcasts everything he sees and hears. Most spy shows involve hacking hard drives or phones. In this show, someone has hacked Alexander's head, so if he's looking at classified information, that information gets broadcast to whatever person or terrorist organization that did this to him. The show then becomes about Alexander trying to figure out who did this to him and why.
Melissa Barrera (Scream and In the Heights) also co-stars as Michelle, an intelligence agent at The Orphanage. When Alexander first meets her, she's working as a bartender. However, that's just a cover. She's really a highly trained operative with weapons and martial arts skills. Her role is to keep an eye on Alexander and earn his trust. She does so by flirting with him until she eventually becomes his girlfriend. Yet, she's clear that if Alexander turns out to be a traitor, her orders are to kill him and she has no hesitation about that fact. She helps to underscore, along with Parker, that a lot of spy-work is really theater work, which is to say it's about playing a role and putting on a performance in order to sell a story to an audience. A lot of this show is about people watching people on screens and on a stage that is literally the world.
To this point, it's good that the supporting cast consists of Broadway veterans like Brian d'Arcy James who has been nominated for the Tony Award at least five times and Kathleen Chalfant who has been consistently doing live theater since the 1970's. She was even nominated for the Tony Award for her role in Angels in America: Millennium Approaches (1993). Angels in America is a play about gay men during the AIDS epidemic. It's interesting because Chalfant plays a mysterious woman named St. Georges who is herself gay in this story.
Because of the nature of the narrative, it limits what Liu can do in terms of acting. He mainly has to be stoic and stone-faced, not showing any emotions because Alexander is hiding the fact that he's been hacked and he can't let the person who hacked him figure out that he knows. The tone of this series is a bit more serious unlike The Recruit, The Night Agent or even The Diplomat, there isn't that much humor here. Noah Centineo in The Recruit could be charming and funny, as well as a little silly because the tone of that show leaned into the comedic aspects. If Liu has charm, he has to restrain it here. It's similar to Gabriel Basso in The Night Agent, but, at least, in that show, he's given a love interest that's true and real, so that show is able to lean a little bit on Basso's rugged, sex appeal. This show doesn't really have the bubbling romance, as Liu and Barrera's characters pretend to be dating but it's clear that there isn't much between them. Liu has sex appeal for days and his shirtless scenes prove that, but it's not focused this season.
Rated TV-MA-VL.
Running Time: 1 hr. / 8 eps.
Available on Peacock.