Legends is an undercover drug gang series and a true story TV adaptation. It follows six ordinary workers. They are recruited from Customs and Excise within the civil service to infiltrate a drugs gang. The series spans everywhere from the mountains of Afghanistan to the streets of Liverpool and a ‘gang of Turkish/Afghanistan origin’.
Why Customs and Excise officers?
The logic follows a simple division: the Navy protects the sea, the Army defends the land, and Customs controls what goes in and out. So it makes sense to recruit from within the department to stop drugs entering the UK.
The Legends themselves aren’t seasoned spies or operatives — they’re ordinary people screened as “suitable” to infiltrate gangs. That doesn’t mean they’re hopeless, though. They’re chosen because they show potential, and some seem to be drawn to the work because they genuinely get a kick out of it.
My verdict
I really enjoyed the ending — don’t get me wrong. But overall, I’d give this undercover drug gang series a 8/10. Six 50-minute episodes was far too long for what the story needed. As a true story TV adaptation, there’s an argument for extra runtime to do the source material justice — but I still think it could’ve been cut to four episodes.
For someone who wasn’t part of the lockdown generation, this was a chore to get through. I nearly gave up after episode three, and honestly the only reason I kept going was the effort I’d already sunk into watching and reviewing it.
By the end, though, I was elated that this Undercover Drung Gang series had come to a genuinely superb finale. The last three episodes are a masterclass in slow-building tension, and I get why some viewers love that style. I do too, in the right dose. My issue is that the first three episodes lean on that same slow burn far too heavily, before the story has earned it.
Peter Jackson maybe wrong
I partly blame Peter Jackson for this. The Lord of the Rings made it “acceptable” for films — and eventually TV — to run longer than they need to. Studio executives used to be the check on runtime bloat, but somewhere along the way that discipline slipped. This is where a lot of modern shows fall down — Legends included — and it’s a symptom of a wider streaming runtime bloat problem, where series get padded out simply because platforms can. Boo to Peter Jackson for making slow burners the norm — the man turned The Hobbit into a trilogy, for God’s sake.
Maybe I am wrong after all, this goes against Rotten Tomatoes whose average rating who give the series 97%. I do like it but 6 x 50 episodes is a bit too much and I do stand by that.
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