Review by C.J. Bunce
Despite a ho-hum title and lackluster pitch, Netflix’s espionage thriller Legends is a great new series at many levels, so good that its one-and-done six-episode season has enough to come back and expand the characters into something more. The problem is that it’s based on actual events so it’s probably not to happen. Viewers are taken back to the 1990s England as Margaret Thatcher is in her last days of power, while heroin use is rapidly becoming so much a problem that America declared its own war on drugs against it. England was slower to react, and according to this series treated it with such nonchalance that it was left to fight it with little funds and volunteer recruits from its Customs service staff. In England’s spy world parlance, “legend” is the persona taken by undercover agents infiltrating gangs and criminal organizations. Tapping a relatively little known supporting cast (except for the man in charge played by Steve Coogan) helps immerse the viewer into a cleverly written, tight crime story from Guilt writer Neil Forsyth that propels Legends to become one of the most engaging, exciting, and riveting British series yet.
Based on The Betrayer: How an Undercover Unit Infiltrated the Global Drug Trade by Guy Stanton (a pseudonym) with Peter Walsh, the series has many parallels to recent movies and films. It has that title to start you off like that of PONIES, a series in the same genre with a similar story. In PONIES, two spy wives are tapped to become actual spies. In Legends, four of England’s ordinary civil servants go undercover to infiltrate two factions of drug dealers, ultimately to take them down. The difference in shows is that here the four volunteer employees of the Customs section are all highly trained and highly skilled in surprisingly useful areas for undercover work. Like Ben Affleck’s account of getting hostages out of Iran called Argo, this series similarly lays out the complicated groundwork necessary to get the job done, however difficult and truly complicated the task in real life actually was. The writing is so compelling and the characters so believable that moving the story ahead with a clip is just fine. The show has less than six hours to get the job done. And it does it. The writing and acting makes the show as engaging as last year’s 1970s action series Duster, which followed a female FBI agent infiltrating a kingpin in the Southwest.
Undercover work sounds like exciting stuff. That’s what four Customs agents thought doing their mundane yet important jobs before their bosses’ boss Don, played by Steve Coogan, arrives promising some excitement, new jobs for a limited time, and life-risking danger, all for no increase in pay and no recognition any other way. Does anyone feel like they have more to offer than what they are giving at their ordinary jobs? Tom Burke plays lead Customs worker Guy, who at least gets to see his wife, played by Charlotte Ritchie, who also works in Customs. Both of them know Guy would use something else in his life. Guy is every brow-beaten 9 to 5 worker who gets little personal fulfillment from what he does every day. So Guy steps forward. So does Erin, played by Jasmine Blackborow. Her accent tells people she comes from big money, only her family lost it years ago. She’s skilled at detective work, seeing a table of numbers or facts and finding commonalities, making the numbers mean something. She becomes the brains behind this shadowy new organization.
Guy and Erin are joined by Kate and Bailey, who team up to go undercover working together. Kate is played by Hayley Squires and Bailey is played by Aml Ameen. Kate is more of the risk taker, a quiet badass willing to walk into a room with a bent cop and not bat an eye. Bailey is more reserved, more leaning toward over-preparing for a mission so nothing can possibly go wrong. All four of them work under Steve Coogan’s put-upon boss Don, a Customs officer and former undercover agent who initially thinks the idea of using Customs to ferret out how to stop the spread of heroin is outright preposterous. Don works under the Head of Customs and Excise, played by Douglas Hodge. While getting browbeaten by their boss the Home Secretary, played by Alex Jennings, together they are supportive of their team going deep into the networks of two international crime syndicates using the docks to sneak in drugs–millions and ultimately billions of dollars of heroin.
The great performances don’t stop at the lead cast. Erin quickly determines the pipeline is two-fold, one coming through Liverpool and the other through London, many of the key figures Turkish. Guy is quickly paired up with a prisoner named Mylonas, played by Gerald Kyd, who is given the option to leave prison early if he assists Guy in his mission to infiltrate the pipeline in London. Kate and Bailey take on the Liverpool operation. The series title Legends really gets played out best by Burke as Guy. Periodically returning to visit his wife and child at home, he soon grows to be too much of his legend, a bad guy who smokes and has no fear, ready to get into a fight or pull a gun at a moment’s notice in a heated pub or clandestine warehouse. The casting of Burke is brilliant because he doesn’t look like a movie star. He’s a regular guy that nobody would expect to be an informant or agent. Another solid performance is from another undercover cop, the quiet and unassuming Shaun (familiar mystery series actor Thomas Coombes). Coombes frequently pops up in genre shows with quirky characters.
They soon home in on young playboy Carter, played by Tom Hughes. Carter is surprisingly smart for a criminal, and he’s able to ferret out moles in his organization nearly as fast as Erin is able to track down his criminal routes. Working for Carter is Eddie McKee (played by Johnny Harris), the drug dealer world’s brains and equivalent to Erin. Unfortunately for Carter, ther very drugs that Eddie is helping Carter sell so well are taken by his own son, who dies in an overdose, prompting Eddie to re-think his own life choices. The Big Bad of the series is Hakan, played by Numan Akar, a Turkish leader who is not inclined to allow any British people on his team. His backstory is layered and sympathetic, based on a life where foreigners came to his country since he was a young boy always attacking and taking advantage of him and his family.
That’s a full slate of characters, and viewers will get to know all them very well in only six episodes. It’s a good ride. For fans of good spy stories found in movies like The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Operation Mincemeat, Monuments Men, The Amateur, The Gray Man, The Courier, and even The Dirty Dozen, and television series like Black Doves, The IPCRESS File, Steeltown Murders, and The Jackal, get ready for the next great British TV series. Could a half dozen people without spy training really win the war on drugs? Apparently they really did.
Highly recommended and one of 2026’s top TV series, all six episodes of Legends are streaming now on Netflix.
Catch up with our reviews of other quality British TV series (including Australian and New Zealand shows you’d find on PBS, BritBox, Acorn TV, and Hulu) beginning with our Top 10: Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes, Zen, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, Mr. Selfridge, Guilt, The IPCRESS File, The Hour, The Gentlemen, Black Doves, and Shetland—especially the first seasons. You could stay pretty busy with our full list of top British TV recommendations: Legends lands right here, then Deadloch, The Artful Dodger, Van Der Valk, the first season of Sherlock, Troppo, Case Histories, This is Going to Hurt, Black Snow, Mystery Road: Origin, Death Valley, Dept. Q, Bodkin, The Bletchley Circle, Good Cop/Bad Cop, Grace, Steeltown Murders, Hinterland, Glitch, Mystery Road, Culprits, Harrow, Annika, Young Sherlock, The Day of the Jackal, Code of Silence, Luther, Professor T, and Supacell.
After you’ve seen all of those, try Viva Blackpool, Marchlands, Lightfields, State of Play, I, Jack Wright, Population 11, Sunny Nights, Protection, After the Flood, Traces, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Scrublands, The Survivors, Ordeal by Innocence, Unforgotten, The Bay, Wild Bill, Quirke, Requiem, The Gloaming, The Clearing, The One, The Tourist, The Tower, Collateral, Roadkill, Stay Close, The Salisbury Poisonings, and A Confession.
Other British series across genres that are worth checking out (a few still to be reviewed here) include fun romps like Monarch of the Glen, Para Handy, Cranford, Viva Blackpool, and As Time Goes By, and cozy mysteries Rosemary and Thyme, Father Brown, Hetty Wainthropp, and Death in Paradise. One of the best of all British productions is the reboot of All Creatures Great and Small, which is in our British Top 10 (and the original is good, too). Of course there’s always Doctor Who for your sci-fi fix (and spin-offs Torchwood and Class), The Watch for your fantasy fix, Truth Seekers and Sea of Souls for your supernatural fix, and Spaced for more sci-fi fun, and we really should add House, MD, for Brit lead Hugh Laurie’s one-of-a-kind performance. (We’ve also reviewed but don’t heartily recommend so much Dublin Murders, The ABC Murders, The Pale Horse, Reef Break, The One That Got Away, The Silence, The Five, The Missing, Thirteen, or Broadchurch, as well as No Offence, which could have merited a review for its first season but, like Sherlock, its later episodes were a disappointment).
Keep coming back to borg, your source for the best of British–and Australian–TV.
