Streaming Smart: A superb cast leads ‘Legends’, Netflix’s tense crime drama set in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain

Legends | Director: Neil Forsyth | Cast: Steve Coogan, Tom Burke, Hayley Squires | Netflix

“These mountains are full of ghosts, there is always room for more,” says the Pashtun drug lord, who styles himself as a servant of history, to a circle of English drug runners. In the tense and taut Legends, we see Margaret Thatcher’s Britain under attack from drugs. As young people start to die of overdose in Thatcher’s council estates, a group of men and women from the customs department come together to impound one of the largest shipments of heroin from Turkey (which goes from Pakistan to Afghanistan to Iran to Turkey) and break a growing cartel of Turks, Liverpudlians and Kurds. Called ‘Legends’, these customs officers use a variety of techniques, from infiltration to sur­veillance to local recruitment to bust the cartel.

The series is intricate and humane in its storytelling as it uncovers the motive of each of the Legends. It also has some of Britain’s finest talent, like the extraordinary Steve Coogan, the riveting Tom Burke and Tom Hughes, and the feisty Hayley Squires. The cat and mouse game has the urgency of a bloodhound race pictured in the series. There is only one motto: “If you're watching them, they're watching you.” Based on The Betrayer: How an Undercover Unit Infiltrated the Global Drug Trade, the 2022 book, Legends is a must watch.