A few years ago, I jumped on the Narcos train a bit late. Luckily a buddy of mine found out I had never seen the show and he punched me in the face (metaphorically) and demanded I go home and watch it immediately. I went home and watched it and was blown away. Ever since Narcos wrapped up, I have been chasing that same, "Dramatized True Crime... but Not Murder" high.
Pickings are quite slim when you eliminate murder from the dramatized true crime options. This normally leaves drugs and heists. Both of which I find incredibly compelling. Legends was my latest attempt to scratch that "Dramatized. True Crime... but Not Murder" itch.
Legends is obviously not even in the same league as Narcos, but it was pretty good. Not great, but good.
Legends is based on the true story of England's "War on Drugs" in the early 1990s. The reason I put that in quotes is that usually wars take maximum effort, great organization and a lot of money. England's "War on Drugs" had none of those things. But what it did have was a few... very few... dedicated soldiers.
Legends tells the story of a small group of poorly trained British Customs agents who try to fulfill Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's promise to win the war on drugs... without actually doing anything to back up that promise. The small team consists of just three agents, a commanding officer and a secretary. And what this team did was simply astounding!
Since there are so few characters, we can take some time to meet the team.
The commanding officer Don, portrayed by Steve Coogin, is the only one of the bunch who has any undercover experience. He is gruff and all business but he does care about his team.
One of the agents Guy, portrayed by Tom Burke, is a family man who is very bored in his current hum drum customs position. He infiltrates a Turkish drug cartel and becomes his undercover identity... his Legend.
Haley Squires and Aml Ameen play a team of agents, Kate and Bailey, who mainly perform surveillance but end up doing much more by the end.
And then there is Erin the secretary, portrayed by Jasmine Blackborow. I did not put her last because she is "just" a secretary. I put her last in order to save one of the best members of the team for last. She is brilliant! In a time when the internet was in its infancy, Erin wields it like the most important weapon the team has.
It is a pretty straight forward formula, law enforcement tries to spy on, infiltrate and stop drug dealers. I have seen it a million times. What made this one worth my time though was the acting, characters, the novelty of seeing a team do it with almost no supports, and the music. The music is FANTASTIC! I was a big club kid in the early 90s and one of the best genres out at the time came from the Manchester England club scene. The show uses many of my favorite songs from the era. If you want an example of the sound, check out Happy Mondays Hallelujah.
https://a2zsoundtrack.com/legends-soundtrack-2026/
The show itself had a slight problem for me. It went from seeming a little too slow and thorough to being sped up way too much. Legends is based on the book The Betrayer: How An Undercover Unit Infiltrated The Global Drug Trade by Guy Stanton and Peter Walsh. Like many shows and movies based on books, Legends suffers from not knowing how much detail to show and when. The story and characters were very compelling so the slow pace was fine. But then it seemed like they realized they only had two episodes left and decided to cram in four episodes worth of story into those two. So while thsi show was good, I think it could have been great if it was two episodes longer.
