What to Watch: Legends is as unsettling as it is riveting

Imagine taking Percy from accounting, Thabo from compliance and perhaps Sarah from marketing and turning them into forensic investigators chasing baddies, almost overnight. It’s guaranteed to be shell-shock for someone more used to pushing paper than to handcuffing a criminal. But that’s the premise and spine of the new Netflix series, Legends.

But instead of corporate staffers, British Customs recruited and trained personnel who usually enjoyed the mundane job of checking bags at airports for contraband. Much like the people you’d see on airport customs documentaries on reality channels and National Geographic. Except, this time, they’re chasing down the burgeoning heroin trade in 90s United Kingdom and going undercover to bust the bad guys.

Netflix’s Legends is based on an actual task force that drew from the same pool of customs officers who, with only a few weeks of training, played a major role in squeezing a large portion of the drug trade to a bad ending. The show is gritty beyond just grit, and it’s riveting.

Gritty and riveting

There’s just something about British television and its blending of method, action and character development that’s, at times, far superior to what its industry cousins release across the Atlantic. Legends is such a show.

The six-part crime drama stars Tom Burke and Steve Coogan. To get back to the plot, in the 90s, heroin was flooding into the UK at alarming levels, and law enforcement had some major issues because the criminals already knew who the police were. Nobody could go undercover, because they were already exposed. This is where the recruited customs officers came in.

A Legend is a fake identity. That’s what these recruits had to build, live inside, and become while under cover. One wrong answer, one forgotten detail or one suspicious glance could mean ending up floating face down somewhere in a waterway.

Watch the trailer

Coogan plays Don Clarke, a former undercover operative tasked with transforming nervous civil servants into believable criminals. Burke, meanwhile, carries much of the emotional weight as Guy, based on real-life investigator Guy Stanton.

Burke interpreted Stanton as a brooding character who’s permanently exhausted, slightly terrified and emotionally unravelled. This, while his young family and supportive but firm wife watched from the sidelines. After checking bags, his new day job was all about infiltrating a brutal Turkish drug cartel in north London. So, go figure.

Alongside Guy, other operatives are played by Hayley Squires and Aml Ameen to great effect and character diversity, and Legends does particularly well not to glitter up undercover work.

There are no slick Hollywood-style action scenes, Miami-Vice-like pensive, curated moments or designer suits. It’s grim and sweaty, and the tension builds naturally, almost as if the show and its situationships between criminals and newbies cannot help but be engaging.

Writer Neil Forsyth’s kept things very simple and the storyline is easy to follow, the dialogue is plain, which also means that the actors have had to be at the top of their game to bring the lines to life. And the performances all around are nothing short of exceptional.

Exceptional performances

The show is layered, and the internal struggle that characters like Guy continually wrestle with feels real because, in one way or another, we can all resonate with it. The same can be said for creating an alter ego or legend. Again, in some way, we all create our own legends at work, at play and in relationships.

Now that’s something to think about, but only after scrolling to the show and drinking in its high entertainment value.