Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | May 13, 2026
The new Netflix series Legends is the kind of show that might appeal to fans of Donnie Brasco — and if you were a huge fan of Donnie Brasco, as I was, that’s not nothing. Inspired by actual events and adapted from The Betrayer: How an Undercover Unit Infiltrated the Global Drug Trade by Guy Stanton and Peter Walsh, it’s about a small group of British customs agents — basically, ordinary civil servants — who are tasked with a top-secret operation to take down drug smugglers in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
Tom Burke (Furiosa, Black Bag) plays Guy Stanton, a man with a boring, dead-end customs job who is quietly desperate for something meaningful in his life. He and three colleagues from Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise sign up for the operation at enormous personal risk, driven less by heroism than by the simpler, more human pull of wanting their lives to matter more than their paperwork does. Under the guidance of their handler, Don (Steve Coogan, playing against type in the best possible way), they assume false identities and split their investigation across two sides of the same drug operation — the Turks bringing the heroin in and the Brits moving it out.
That’s the outline, and it doesn’t come close to capturing how genuinely riveting Legends often is. Guy assumes a persona entirely separate from the loving father and husband he is at home — something harder, meaner, more dangerous — to become the linchpin between the Turkish and British operations. Meanwhile, Kate (Hayley Squires) and Bailey (Aml Ameen) work to find an in on the British side, all three of them backed up by Erin (Jasmine Blackborow), who manages research and logistics from the shadows. The show is smart enough to understand that an operation like this doesn’t just need people willing to lie — it needs people willing to become someone else entirely, and to understand what that costs.
It’s good, even if it can be occasionally overwritten and the speechifying tips into indulgence more than once. But the six-episode series is deeply engrossing and British enough in its DNA that it’s never entirely clear who, if any of the four, will walk away from this with their lives, their families, or their sense of self intact. I don’t want to say much more for fear of spoiling it, although it’s hard to spoil Tom Burke’s phenomenal performance (suck it, Johnny Depp) or the collection of skillfully executed undercover-operation tropes that Forsyth deploys with something close to surgical precision.
What lingers, though, isn’t the tradecraft or the tension, but the toll it takes on these ordinary people. These are not spies. They are not trained for this. They are people who wanted their lives to mean something and were handed an opportunity that slowly ate everything around it. Legends is a genuinely excellent crime drama that pulls the viewer in almost as far as it pulls Guy into his assumed identity — which is to say, further than is probably comfortable, and further than you’ll be able to resist.
‘Legends’ is currently streaming on Netflix.
