The Wire, Breaking Bad, Peaky Blinders, Top Boy. Why is it that so many of the grand, sweeping epics of our time are about drug dealers? Here’s a theory I’ve been toying with: to make a brilliant bit of ensemble television you need a vast number of characters, a complicated structure in which they can play out their venal political rivalries, layers upon layers of shifting power dynamics and an astonishing degree of internecine bureaucracy. Such circumstances only appear in two places: cocaine cartels and the civil service. And only one of these lets you bring a gun to work.
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There is a limit to public appetite for shows set in the Department for Work and Pensions, so instead we have another drug yarn. Legends is a new series from Neil Forsyth, the screenwriter and author of The Gold, a drama heavily based on the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery that had everyone collapsing with delight a couple of years ago. Forsyth’s new show tells the true Thatcher-era story of a group of customs agents who went undercover to stem the vast tides of cocaine flooding into the UK.
It’s a plot born for TV, the sort of fish-out-of-water premise upon which half of Hollywood’s buddy comedies are built. Legends stars Steve Coogan as the agents’ handler, in what must be one of his best performances, given that I didn’t spend the whole time he was marching round the screen looking gruff and tormented, thinking, “Yeh, sorry, that’s just Alan Partridge.” The premise, the star and some decent early gags mean that you start this show thinking it is going to be a comedy. It isn’t. It’s much darker.
Legends has that rare thing that made The Wire remarkable: it seems to tell the story not just of a few cops and robbers, but of a whole city. There, Baltimore. Here, Liverpool. In fact, the show feels even broader than that. We get forays into the poppy fields of Afghanistan, and scenes in Whitehall give us a glimpse of the wider anxieties of 1980s Britain. If the only institution as complex as a drug supply chain is the civil service, the only boss scarier than a Mob boss is Mrs Thatcher.
It is, of course, the most poisoned of chalices to compare any television show to The Wire — I wouldn’t want to pretend that Legends manages to convey five soaring seasons’ worth of complexity in this six-episode series. But Forsyth has a remarkable ability to capture minor characters’ humanity with immense economy and speed. At the start of episode three, through the window of a suburban house we see a car arrive and hear an excited Liverpudlian mother calling to her husband, “He’s here! Come on, he’s here,” as a young squaddie gets out.
Two and a half minutes later the young man is shooting up, and you just know — somehow — that it’s all going to be over for him soon. I found myself welling up. In that tiny amount of time we get just enough flashes of who this boy is, what he means to the people who love him. It’s a fantastic bit of storytelling. The whole show is.
Lucy Punch returns in AmandalandNatalie Seery/BBC
Now, enough gushing. Let’s get down to brass tacks. I need your help with something. These things I know: Amandaland and its predecessor Motherland are lauded as some of the best comedies to come out of the BBC in recent years. Lucy Punch’s Amanda is a fantastic creation, mortifyingly aspiring in the glorious tradition of Hyacinth Bucket. In Amandaland — now in its second series — the expensively blonde mother of teenagers is forced to downsize to south Harlesden (SoHa, as she insists on calling it), and seeks to establish her superiority over the locals. Joanna Lumley, as Amanda’s equally heinous mother, is wonderful (when is she not?), and the whole thing is a fantastic example of social-cringe comedy, sharply observed and pleasingly silly.
There are some lovely one-liners. “If you like those, I’d recommend The Handmaid’s Tale,” suggests a fellow mother after Amanda has been showing off about all the dystopian fiction she’s been reading. “Oh sure,” replies our hero, “I’ll check that out, I like anything handmade.” I’d defy anybody not to enjoy Amanda strutting round after taking out a personal loan, claiming that her lifestyle “business” Senuous has attracted “some major Chinese investors”, “a banking corporation based out of Hong Kong and Shanghai”. “You mean HSBC?” “I don’t think people call it that.”
The problem is, I just cannot watch this show. I gave it a really good try, but then the same thing happened that caused me to switch off halfway through series one: we hit a scene of such excruciating awkwardness that I just had to look away. Last time it was some horror show involving a house party and a hot tub that I have blocked out of my brain in self-preservation. This time it was Amanda giving a talk at her kids’ school about her “career” as an influencer. The same thing happened to me with The Office and The Inbetweeners. I just can’t do it. I am not constitutionally robust enough to watch even fictional characters embarrass themselves that much.
A generous interpretation of this phenomenon would be that I have an overdeveloped sense of empathy: I am just too caring. Less generously, I am pathetically ill-prepared for the horrors of this world. If you are the type of person who can enjoy these types of comedies I am envious. Please, tell me how. Were you brought up differently to me? Are you just genetically superior?
Your astonishing tolerance for awkwardness must, I assume, mean you are living a better life than me. Are you telling your friends when they have annoyed you, thus lancing the boil and avoiding months of passive-aggressive stewing? Are you sending back your coffee when it’s wrong rather than smiling weakly and scuttling round the corner — definitely round the corner, don’t want to upset anybody — to tip it away?
Are you earning more money than me, having better sex? Is your gas bill lower than mine, your holiday more luxurious? Do people give up their seats for you on the bus? I can only assume the answer is yes. And you get to enjoy Amandaland too. I hate you for it. I hate you. Not that I’d ever tell you that, obviously.
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