I’m now late in Season 1 of Counterpart. Really really good show: closest in genre I guess to a Cold War spy thriller, but based on the sci-fi premise that our world divided into two identical copies about thirty years ago, and since then those two worlds have diverged more and more. (It’s set in the present day; divergence was around 1988.) There’s one tunnel where you can cross between the two worlds, and different agencies are in charge of managing that border and handling exchanges of information. Since this is a spy thriller, once in a while these agencies are also killing people in attempts to save / murder millions more people. JK Simmons (most famous as J. Jonah Jamison in Spiderman perhaps, but he’s far better an actor than I ever realized! - oh, er, I see he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Whiplash, so I guess for many people his range isn’t a revelation) plays two versions of himself, something of a soft but happy “nice guy” in this world and a hard bitten cynical super agent in the other world, and of course part of the show is figuring out how the same person wound up going down two such radically different paths.
Mild spoiler for one way the two worlds have diverged, revealed around episode 2 or 3:
How ironic that a show I started watching as escapist fare during a plague features one world where 7% of the population was wiped out by a plague.
It was cancelled after two seasons because no one watched it, despite fantastic reviews (100% at Rotten Tomatoes for critics, 90% for audience, FWIW). I suppose that’s what you get when you’re on Starz and no one can even find your show, sadly. However, fortunately they had two seasons planned from the start, and apparently the story does wrap up reasonably well.
Available on Amazon Prime in the US and perhaps other territories. I’d refrained from obtaining it by other means because I’d heard rumors it’d soon be on a streaming service. Then it did indeed appear on a streaming service, but not in Taiwan, so I’m making use of a copy that, um, fell off a truck onto my hard drive or something.
If anyone’s read and liked China Miéville’s The City and the City, I find the feel of Counterpart very similar; also not far off The Americans, although I’ve yet to get beyond Season 1 in that show.