1 day ago
10
Legends ★★★★
Told in a succinct six episodes, Legends is a very British take on the international crime drama – imagine The French Connection remade by the Minder crew. It’s the early 1990s, heroin overdoses are surging, and an under-siege Margaret Thatcher needs a win. The solution? Posters asking “Can you offer more?” in the tearooms belonging to Her Majesty’s Customs. Undercover investigators are to be recruited from the baggage inspectors and dirty magazine investigators, to infiltrate murderous drug syndicates. Training lasts three weeks.
The show is very loosely based on historic events. It’s “inspired” by the memoir of Guy Stanton, who spent 11 years working undercover for Customs targeting drug importers. The Guy Stanton here, played by Tom Burke, is an unfulfilled Customs officer who is one of the few – alongside Kate (Hayley Squires) and Bailey (Aml Ameen) – to pass the screening process run by veteran agent Don Clarke (Steve Coogan). Sardonic and counter-intuitive, Don promises his graduates the greatest challenge of their lives, albeit without a per diem.
Legends is not a complicated procedural. If you want one related to British criminal history, see creator Neil Forsyth’s previous show The Gold, which uses a daring 1983 armed heist to explore institutional corruption and social struggle. This is a smash and grab operation, told with telling humour and constant risk. If the undercover agents, divided between Liverpool and London, make one mistake with their false identities – their legends – they face instant execution.
Yes, the agents infiltrate vicious drug networks with surprising ease, but Forsyth is such an accomplished storyteller that you don’t have time to stress-test plausibility. Some creators would spend the entire first episode on the selection and training process – Forsyth gets it sorted in 15 minutes of screen time.
But that doesn’t mean that the characters don’t have a wellspring of motivation. Legends is a series about ordinary people finding a purpose by reaching for the extraordinary, even if they risk – particularly Guy – getting lost in the role.
With a chef’s kiss period soundtrack (The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays), the limited series develops sharply effective portraits of characters who could be gangster cliches. Johnny Harris is immense as Liverpool enforcer Eddie McKee, questioning what he’s done to his hometown. There’s no commentary on the repetitive struggle of a war on drugs, but authority figures get set straight as the nobodies defy the somebodies.
