Two bodies open Neil Forsyth‘s Legends, the British crime import arriving on Netflix this week. The first belongs to a fifteen-year-old boy from a Liverpool council estate. The second is an Oxford student, dead in a posh dorm room. Different lives, different futures, killed by the same thing: heroin. By 1990, the country’s drug smuggling pipeline had already grown too lucrative and well-protected for British law enforcement to chip away at through normal channels, and Legends drops us dead center into that reality.

Steve Coogan, Tom Burke, and Charlotte Richie lead a cast of homegrowns populating Forsyth’s based on a true story tale about how, faced with losing their own “war on drugs,” the Brits came up with a laughably ridiculous plan — to take Customs officers out of their day jobs, give them basic training, send them undercover into Britain’s most dangerous heroin gangs, and hope for the best. No, really. Forsyth, the writer-creator behind The Gold, has a real knack for turning forgotten chapters of British history into propulsive television, and across six episodes, he treats this premise with exactly the mix of disbelief and respect it deserves. The result is a tense, unfussy, occasionally overstuffed thriller with one hell of a payload.

What Is ‘Legends’ About?

It’s hard to fight a War on Drugs when you can’t afford one, but Legends gets a lot of mileage out of watching British bureaucracy try anyway. The first episode tracks the trickle-down effect of Downing Street pressure as it lands on Angus Blake (Douglas Hodge), the Director of Customs Investigations. Blake hands the actual operation to Don Clark (Coogan, doing terrific work, in his own northern accent no less), a head of operations whose own undercover past has left him with what we’d now call PTSD but what the ‘90s labeled as “a bit damaged.”

Don’s job is to assemble a team of Customs officers willing to risk their lives building fake identities — legends, in trade speak — and infiltrate the heroin gangs running shipments through Liverpool and the south coast. The recruitment poster he tapes up in office bathrooms asks a question with a near-universal pull: “Could you offer more?” The four people who answer it are not, by any reasonable measure, qualified for what’s about to happen to them.

‘Legends’ Successfully Navigates Two Compelling Criminal Underworlds

The training montage that follows is short and unusually grounded. Don’s recruits sit at desks reading bank records, looking for the laundering patterns that betray a dealer’s organization. They pick locks and run reconnaissance charades. Don watches them and decides who has it. (Spoiler: Most don’t.) Burke’s Guy makes the cut despite being the kind of man you’d least expect to. A Heathrow lifer married to a fellow Customs officer (Ritchie’s Sophie, who does a lot with just a little, screen time-wise), Guy reads, in his early scenes, as someone doing the bare minimum when it comes to life. Depressed is too clinical a word, but he’s definitely unfulfilled. He is also, Don notes with some discomfort, not really a team player.

The other legends round out a deliberately mismatched roster. Hayley Squires brings a dry, sarcastic charge to Kate, a gung-ho agent champing at the bit to bust some bad guys. Aml Ameen‘s Bailey is her opposite, a methodical VAT inspector who has spent his life keeping his head down. Their forced partnership in Liverpool is one of the show’s better pairings. Jasmine Blackborow‘s Erin works on the back end, generating the paperwork — driving licenses, bills, fake company registrations — that keeps everyone alive in the field. The investigation eventually splits into two. In Liverpool, Kate and Bailey trail a distribution network that runs through bread delivery trucks and backstreets, ultimately leading to Declan Carter (Tom Hughes), a social-climbing drug boss who has scrubbed off his nightclub-bouncer past with bespoke suits and ruthless ambition. In London, Guy is sent to infiltrate the Turkish heroin operation working out of Green Lanes, where unassuming cafés function as distribution hubs and the gang’s patriarch, Hakan (Numan Acar), runs his trade like a man with conviction.

Guy’s way in is Mylonas, played by Gerald Kyd, and Mylonas is the reason you’ll keep watching this show. A Greek expatriate fresh out of prison, he is the kind of informant who cannot stop talking. He can’t be trusted either, but you find yourself craving him on-screen because he brings a kind of chaotic competence that’s just fun to watch. Kyd plays him as a wild card with genuine intelligence underneath. He’s charming and dangerous, never sentimental, always three moves ahead of whoever thinks they’re handling him.

‘Legends’ Plotting Is Dense, but the Stakes Are Real

Image via Netflix

The action ramps up faster than Legends probably needs it to. By Episode 2, rival gangs are robbing each other’s shipments, bodies are turning up, and the Turkish and Liverpool operations have begun the slow, fraught negotiation that will eventually fuse them into a single supply-and-distribution chain. Forsyth scores one of the show’s better confrontations to Depeche Mode‘s “Personal Jesus,” and the soundtrack, as a whole, does a lot of the period work.

Plot-wise, this is a show that demands attention. There are a lot of names, a lot of cities, a lot of cross-pollinated criminal hierarchies, and Legends refuses to dumb any of it down. Some viewers will find a notebook useful, and some might just clock out before they’ve even met the players in Istanbul, Pakistan, and elsewhere. That’s the risk, but the trade-off is a story that feels properly enormous in scope, the way real organized crime actually is rather than the way television usually pretends.

The show’s biggest weakness, besides its density, is its central villain. Hughes is a perfectly capable actor, but Carter is written more as a caricature than a person, and when the back half of the season asks him to anchor a gang war he hasn’t been given the interior life to support, the cracks show. Legends compensates by routing its real emotional weight through Eddie (Johnny Harris), Carter’s enforcer and oldest friend, whose son’s heroin overdose forces a reckoning that the writers handle with care.

‘Legends’ Ambition Outshines Its Occasional Messiness

Image via Netflix

There’s a moment late in the season where Don tells his team that if they pull this off, they’ll have done more in one operation than most people manage in a lifetime, and the show clearly believes him. That kind of conviction is what Legends gets right. The character work is sharp. Forsyth has built out an entire criminal economy from top to bottom, both ends of the supply chain, and the scope of what he’s trying to capture across six hours is genuinely impressive. It’s also where the show occasionally trips over itself. There are too many names and too many side players running at once, and somewhere between Liverpool and Green Lanes, you start wishing someone had taken a red pen to the cast sheet.

None of that ruins it, though. If anything, the messiness is part of why the show feels so alive — and there’s something genuinely refreshing, as an American viewer, about watching another country wrestle with its version of the War on Drugs. We’ve been buried in our own for so long that there’s real pleasure in being a few degrees removed from the consequences. Legends lets you watch the same fight play out somewhere else, with different accents and a deeply British flavor of bureaucratic chaos, and just enjoy the story. It might be the most watchable crime drama Netflix puts out this year.

Legends premieres May 7 on Netflix.

Release Date

May 7, 2026

Network

Netflix

Directors

Brady Hood, Julian Holmes

Pros & Cons

• Neil Forsyth’s scripts mine real comedy out of the absurd setup without ever losing the tension.
• The ’90s period detail feels lived-in instead of nostalgic.
• Gerald Kyd’s Mylonas is the kind of Greek gangster we’d want to have a beer with.

• The plot is dense ? like keep-a-spreadsheet-handy dense.
• Tom Hughes’ Carter never quite works as a villain.