Legends review: Steve Coogan goes undercover on Netflix
Neil Forsyth’s true-story drama sends HM Customs officers undercover with 1990s heroin gangs. Tom Burke is terrific and Coogan growls nicely, but some hour-long episodes drag.
Reviewed, edited and approved by Editor-in-chief Daniel Sköld · Updated 25 October 2026
Contents
In the early 1990s, Britain’s answer to a heroin epidemic was to take customs officers away from their day jobs, give them some basic training and send them into the country’s most dangerous drug gangs. If you pitched that as fiction, a commissioning editor would probably throw you out. It really happened, though, and Neil Forsyth has made it into Legends, a six-part Netflix thriller.
This is the man who wrote The Gold, the BBC’s very good take on the Brink’s-Mat robbery, so the pedigree is there. He also has Steve Coogan with a voice like a cement mixer and Tom Burke on top form. The question is whether it deserves six hours of your already over-booked evenings.
Premiere2026-05-07
GenreAction & Adventure, Crime, Drama
CastTom Burke, Steve Coogan, Hayley Squires, Aml Ameen
Created byNeil Forsyth
Seasons1 season · 6 episodes
ChannelNetflix
Rated15
Watch onNetflix
76%
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Heroin, Whitehall and the customs men in way over their heads
Legends opens with two bodies. One is a 15-year-old boy from a Liverpool council estate and the other is an Oxford student. Both were killed by heroin, and that’s the point: by the early 90s the drug had reached every class and postcode. With the government losing its own war on drugs, Customs is told to put together a small team that can get inside the gangs bringing the stuff in.
Doing the recruiting is Don, played by Coogan, a weary operator who knows exactly how mad the plan is. His best find is Guy, played by Burke, a quiet man with a family at home and an unexpected gift for becoming someone else. The series is inspired by The Betrayer, a book by the real Guy Stanton, who worked undercover for years. As the title suggests, the drama is all in the ‘legends’, the invented identities these officers have to live inside. One slip in a pub car park could be their last.
Who’s in it and who made it
Forsyth created and wrote the series, and Brady Hood and Julian Holmes direct. Alongside Burke and Coogan are Hayley Squires, Aml Ameen, Jasmine Blackborow and Tom Hughes, a solid line-up of British talent with not a single cockney-geezer caricature among them. Burke, who was Strike on the BBC and turned up in Furiosa, holds the whole thing together with nervous energy and stillness. Coogan, meanwhile, has fun with Don’s dry asides. There’s no hint of Alan Partridge, but enough bite to cut through the gloom.
The most frightening thing in Legends is not the gangsters. It’s the idea that our first line of defence against them was a bloke from Customs with a fake name and a few weeks’ training.
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What works and what doesn’t
What it does best is the tension. The undercover scenes are quiet and clammy, built on conversations where one wrong answer could get someone killed, which is far more nerve-racking than any car chase. The period detail never turns into nostalgia either. This is a 90s of grim offices, bad carpets and lives being wrecked, not Britpop and Cool Britannia. Forsyth also makes a smart choice to step away from the operation now and then and show the people at the other end of the supply chain. It gives the story some weight that most cop shows can’t be bothered with.
The problems are just as familiar. Like so much on Netflix, the episodes run to about an hour and several of them could lose 15 minutes without anyone noticing. The middle stretch gets bogged down in meetings, logistics and procedure, and with so many characters on both sides of the law, a few of them get squeezed out. It’s dense rather than confusing, but you’ll need to put your phone down.
What the critics say
Reviews have been mostly good. The Telegraph called it a ‘sure-footed six-part thriller’ and said you never stop marvelling that it really happened. Variety praised the ‘uniformly strong cast’ and called the series a ‘gripping tale of found potential and assumed identity’. Both reviews scored 80 on Metacritic. The Guardian was a little cooler, arguing that all the effort spent keeping things serious stops the series catching fire, though it still called it ‘a brilliant story, here well told’. Collider went for ‘tense, unfussy, occasionally overstuffed’, which is about as fair a one-line summary as you’ll find. TheJournal.ie liked its sense of humour and the way it widens the lens to show the human cost of the trade. The dissenters, mostly online reviewers, said the same thing I did: the first episodes grip and the middle sags.
Where and when to watch it in the UK
Legends launched on Netflix in the UK on 7 May 2026. All six episodes arrived at once, so you can binge it, and the UK age rating is 15 for drug use, violence and the kind of language you’d expect from people who import heroin by the tonne. It’s a single, self-contained season, which is a relief if your list of unfinished series is already longer than your list of unfinished DIY jobs.
Verdict
Legends is a gripping, grown-up British crime drama built on a true story so unlikely you’ll keep checking that it actually happened. Burke is superb and Coogan is a pleasure, even if the hour-long episodes sometimes feel as slow as a customs queue on a bank holiday. If you liked The Gold, Line of Duty or anything in which nervous men lie for a living, it’s well worth your evenings. Just don’t expect fireworks.
Ashley Isaacs picks what's worth your evening – film, TV, streaming, music and books for men 45 and over with limited evenings and too many subscriptions. Reviews of what's new on Netflix, Prime Video, BBC iPlayer and the rest, crime dramas worth a weekend, and classics worth a second look. What's worth watching, what isn't, and where to find it in the UK.
One of Midcent's writers. Spotted something? Write to ashley@midcent.uk.
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