Television

„Legends“ (Netflix)

‘…Neil Forsyth’s Netflix series Legends feels like it’s aiming for the kind of intensity that made the first season of True Detective such breakthrough television; that’s a high compliment for a show with big ambitions….’

If the name Tannadice Pictures doesn’t mean much to you, Tannadice is the home ground of Scottish football team Dundee United, and the company/production label is the venture of screenwriter Neil Forsyth, who scored a big hit with Guilt; his latest is Legends, a new six-part thriller for Netflix which got off to a fairly bracing start. Set in the early 1990’s towards the end of the Thatcher years, it’s based on the book The Betrayer: How An Undercover Unit Infiltrated The Global Drug Trade, written by Guy Stanton and Peter Walsh, and the unfamiliarity of the pre-internet setting works for it. With the title suggesting the emphasis on legends, which is to say the assumed undercover identities of those seeking to bust heroin smuggling in the UK, this feels like it’s aiming for the kind of intensity that made the first season of True Detective such breakthrough television; that’s a high compliment for an unassuming show with big ambitions.

The right casting helps too; Steve Coogan adopts his most serious voice to play Don, a government operative who has been deep undercover himself and is quick to weed out any of the applicants for his Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise scheme if he feels they don’t have what it takes to survive in his deadly world. Central to his plans is ex-boxer Guy (Tom Burke) who leaves his wife and child at home to travel to Liverpool and infiltrate the Turkish community there. Opening episode Could You Offer More? also introduces Hayley Squires as Kate, Jasmine Blackborow as Erin and Ami Ameen as Bailey, all part of the crack team that Don has created for the Home Secretary (Alex Jennings); the opening salvo ended with Guy with a gun to his head, and there’s every reason to imagine that knife-edge intensity is going to continue.

Legends starts with two sobering deaths, a rich young woman at Oxford University, a poor young man on a housing estate, both victims of what was a growing industry in heroin. This sets up Legends as an Untouchables-type story of extreme sacrifices made to combat a new kind of crime, and making Don an Elliot Ness crime-fighting figure; Coogan plays him to the grim hilt, like George Cowley in fondly remembered tv show The Professionals. But Burke is the biggest draw here; while audiences didn’t seem to be drawn to his Mad Max figure in Furiosa, he’s absolutely ideal as the troubled, heroic Guy. A scene in which he watches as home invaders nearly discover his daughter’s birthday card suggests that his cover will constantly be on the edge of being blown, and that underlying tension makes for great tv.

As with Department Q, Netflix do seem to have a gift for making the kind of old-school, route-one television that the BBC and other traditional networks seem to have long given up on; it’s gritty, it’s grimy, it’s involving and doesn’t seem that huge a leap from where we’ve been before. With most households worldwide cutting their streaming budget as the cost of gas skyrockets, binge-friendly shows like Legends are essential to home entertainment; it’s the kind of audience-friendly, socially aware story that’s easy to get deep undercover with. Maybe a bunch of disgruntled customs workers teaming up on government business doesn’t sound like the most exciting tv, but in Forsyth’s hands it plays so well, reflecting previously untold stories and likely to grip right to the inevitable, bitter end.

written by Alex Jennings

Sarah Dempster, Ther Guardian