Legends: the realistic sibling of Slow Horses

Neil Forsyth, the creator and writer, starts from a story that is hard to believe. And yet it really happened.

In the early 90s, British Customs was losing the battle against drug smuggling and decided to recruit ordinary civil servants with no experience as spies, give them false identities and send them to infiltrate criminal organisations. 

Yes, exactly as you are reading it. The government sent these police officers, secretaries and administrators out onto the streets to take on gangsters, basically saying “figure it out”. And they did. They really did.

Those constructed identities were the “legends” that give the series its name.

A six-episode British miniseries starring Tom Burke and Steve Coogan. Alongside them are Hayley Squires, Tom Hughes, Aml Ameen, Jasmine Blackborow and an excellent Johnny Harris as Eddie McKee. Brady Hood directs the first four episodes and Julian Holmes the final two.

The most curious thing about the premise is, as I say, that those undercover operatives were not James Bond. Not at the beginning, and not at the end of the series. That difference from more fictional takes is precisely what makes Legends.

Plot of Legends

I have already given you the summary: a group of civil servants are recruited to infiltrate the networks responsible for bringing large quantities of drugs into the United Kingdom.

To do it they have to learn to become other people: create a false past, memorise it, talk like criminals, mix with them and, above all, make sure nobody suspects that behind this new character there is still a very different person.

And the longer you spend being your legend, the harder it becomes to separate the two lives.

AliExpress spies

This is one aspect of Legends that unmistakably recalls Slow Horses.

English spies with no glamour whatsoever, all of them flawed characters, with a very british sense of humour and far more bureaucracy than action.

The difference is that Slow Horses pushes that idea towards fiction and exaggeration, while Legends is its realistic sibling. It is not a mockumentary, but you believe what you are watching.

And you believe it because of the characters and the cast.

Tom Burke is very good precisely because his character is nowhere near ready for any of this. At least initially. He may adapt a little too quickly to undercover work, but the screw-ups he makes help preserve a certain plausibility.

Steve Coogan is also excellent in this more serious mode and, well, the entire cast actually works especially well. It is hard to find series like this, where every character, including supporting roles and villains, is well built and their strengths and weaknesses are clear.

There are plenty of moments where you can see it, but I will not reveal them so you can enjoy them yourself. Suffice it to say that almost all of them have a personality of their own. Even characters who could have been purely functional, such as the secretary, get moments where their personality comes through.

And then, of course, there is Eddie McKee.

Johnny Harris probably creates my favourite character: someone who initially seems calm, even a little meek, but gradually reveals what he is capable of.  

His evolution, one of the most notable in the series, is believable because his personality does not suddenly change. You simply discover that he was much more complex than he first appeared.

A series that makes you put your phone down

Another of its great strengths is that it does not explain absolutely everything.

Especially at the start of some episodes, you can find yourself dropped into a situation already underway and it is up to you to reconstruct how they got there.

I like that. It makes you pay attention and think.

It also knows how to tell small stories with very few shots. For example, there is an arc showing how an ordinary young man — a soldier, the son of a well-off family — ends up hooked on drugs that could easily have become a fifteen-minute montage. Here they need five scenes for you to understand perfectly how anyone at the time could end up caught in it.

That is good storytelling — and a way to stand apart from the mainstream.

In the same way, the series also explains well enough how drug trafficking and Customs work operated, giving you the context needed to understand the system.

The United Kingdom in the early 90s

And if you combine good storytelling with careful production, you get a very convincing period setting.

The streets, cars, clothes, pubs, way of speaking, social differences, relationship with drugs, the image of Customs and the police themselves, and an overall feeling that you are watching the United Kingdom in the early 90s.

This comes with an added difficulty: if you watch the series in the original version, the Liverpool accent is strong. In other words, this is not BBC English. The problem is that at first it can be quite hard to follow and may even make you feel that you are watching a series designed almost exclusively for British viewers.

It is not, but it probably demands a little more attention from you than other Netflix productions.

The least believable part

Legends also manages to stop implausible situations from undermining its realistic tone too much.

There are shipwrecks, drugs floating on rafts and the odd coincidence in the final stretch — such as one of the traffickers ending up precisely at the home of a relative of someone whose death he had ordered — that feel too cinematic to take literally, but they are trivial compared with everything else.

Verdict

In short, this is a very good miniseries that perhaps had material to be even more ambitious.

A story like this might perhaps have aspired to achieve the same impact as Chernobyl: using very specific real events to build something with even greater historical, political and social weight.

Forsyth — and Netflix, which produces it — prefer a more restrained series.

Something that will not become the thing everyone talks about on Instagram — sadly — and that is told in six episodes, without a single one feeling unnecessary.

It does not have that ambition, but it does have good characters, a terrific cast, tension, well-judged humour, an excellent setting and a very interesting premise.

The problem is that by not trying to be something more, it risks going largely unnoticed, which is precisely what has happened.

Which is still a terrible injustice.

Seriously, give it a look.

Technical details

Field	Details
Title	Legends
Year	2026
Episodes	6
Runtime	48-74 minutes per episode
Creator and writer	Neil Forsyth
Directors	Brady Hood and Julian Holmes
Main cast	Tom Burke, Steve Coogan, Johnny Harris, Tom Hughes, Hayley Squires, Aml Ameen and Jasmine Blackborow
Genre	Drama, crime and thriller
Country	United Kingdom
Platform	Netflix
Based on true events	Yes, inspired by undercover operations involving British Customs officials infiltrating drug-trafficking networks