Forget ‘Contagion’ — Watch ‘Counterpart’ for Your Coronavirus Binge Instead

With Coronavirus (or COVID-19, if you like) forcing people to work from home, folks are turning to streaming in droves. Specifically, people are wondering what they can watch to get some insight on this pandemic. Most people are watching Contagion, Steven Soderbergh’s chilling look at how a pandemic spreads. (Spoiler: It starts with Gwyneth Paltrow.)

However, in this time of shifting norms and rampant anxiety, there’s one show that is a must-watch for your Coronavirus binge. Starz’s underrated spy thriller Counterpart is not only a great watch, but it deals directly with two parallel worlds. One is the one we live in, and the other is a colder, meaner place irrevocably ruined by a flu-like pandemic.

Counterpart stars J.K. Simmons as a sweet and woefully ordinary man named Howard Silk. Howard is an American living in Berlin and working for a mysterious government agency. His job requires him to enter a room and interview another person with a pre-written list of codes. It’s confusing and confounding, and Howard has no clue what is going on.

However, it is soon made clear that Howard is working at an agency tasked with keeping the doorway between two parallel universes safe and secure. In the late 1980s, Cold War scientists accidentally created a doorway between these two worlds and since that moment, the rift between these two twin universes has deepened. While our world trucked along, our twin timeline suffered a debilitating epidemic. A mysterious flu came and destroyed whole societies. Things get more complicate when you realize that there are people in that world who blame our world for that flu.

Watch Counterpart for a juicy thriller full of fantastic performances and clever twists — that make sense! But what makes it a true must-watch today is the way it depicts the ramifications of a global pandemic. In the years since the flu’s appearance, social distancing has become the norm. Technology has evolved differently (with an emphasis on medical science), and people wear masks in public. In fact, it’s these small, sparse differences that really help ground the viewer in either reality. Our world is the messy, crowded one. Theirs is empty, cold, and full of caution.

In fact, the characters from the other side have usually been irrevocably shaped by the flu. If we’re not talking about children who were orphaned and then raised to be spies, we’re looking at adults whose hearts calloused over. Howard Silk only learns about the other world because his double — or counterpart — from the other side has crossed over to warn of impending danger. Although the two men are identical, and both played by J.K. Simmons, they are incredibly different. Our world’s version of Howard is humble to the point of erasing himself, kind, and facile. The Howard who survived the flu has transformed himself into a stone cold killer and the architect of a massive spy stratagem.

Counterpart not only shows us a world transformed by pandemic, but a society full of people traumatized by it. Those who survived the flu are still fighting to overcome the tragedies of their past.

Counterpart Seasons 1 & 2 are now streaming on Prime Video.

Where to stream Counterpart