{"id":473024,"date":"2026-05-07T13:26:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T13:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/473024\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T13:26:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T13:26:11","slug":"legends-on-netflix-steve-coogan-in-his-element-in-a-gripping-true-crime-thriller-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/473024\/","title":{"rendered":"Legends on Netflix: Steve Coogan in his element in a gripping true crime thriller \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

The last time we saw Steve Coogan<\/a>, he was playing a weirdly wimpy version of former Ireland soccer manager Mick McCarthy in World Cup walkout horror movie Saipan<\/a>. In that film, Coogan misjudged his portrayal of McCarthy as a shrinking violet against Roy Keane\u2019s<\/a> raging anger-bot. The actor is famously not a fan of soccer \u2013 and it showed.<\/p>\n

He is on firmer ground in excellent true crime drama Legends <\/b>(Netflix, Thursday), which tells the story of how an unglamorous cabal of British customs and excise officers was sent undercover to tackle the crime gangs flooding the UK<\/a> with heroin in the early 1990s.<\/p>\n

A similar drama could have been made about Ireland \u2013 but such a project is unlikely to ever see the light of day, at least not on Netflix<\/a>, which is more interested in caricaturing Ireland as a land of 24-hour potato people (House of Guinness, Bodkin, etc).<\/p>\n

Then again, did any Irish politician speak out against drug dealers as ferociously as Margaret Thatcher did? It was her direct intervention that led to excise officers going undercover, following a series of high-profile drug deaths. <\/p>\n

Coogan is in his element as investigation head Don, a gruff north-of-Englander who almost lost his own marbles when undercover, and who sends his new crew of recruits to the front line with a heavy heart. They include Tom Burke as a bored customs official tasked with infiltrating the London gang that controls a huge chunk of the heroin business.<\/p>\n

In Liverpool, meanwhile, Call the Midwife\u2019s Hayley Squires plays a former anti-pornography snoop trying to get an inside track on the heroin network in the north of England.<\/p>\n

An assumed identity was obviously easier to pull off in the days before the internet. But adopting an entirely new persona was still a fraught undertaking. Don reminds his guinea pigs it is crucial to have a convincing \u201clegend\u201d \u2013 the fake backstory they must sell to the world and also to themselves, lest they be caught telling porky pies to some very dangerous people.<\/p>\n

The 1990s setting gives Legends writer Neil Forsyth (who scripted romping 1980s bank-job caper The Gold for BBC) scope to lean into the rave-era madness \u2013 the series is suffused with strobe lights and banging house piano.<\/p>\n

True crime can often feel as if it is dining out on the mise<\/p>\n

ry of strangers. But Legends is a gripping, seat-of-the-pants thriller that sets itself the daunting task of making customs and excise workers appear moody and glamorous \u2013 and more or less pulls it off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The last time we saw Steve Coogan, he was playing a weirdly wimpy version of former Ireland soccer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":473025,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[18,117,19,17,91650,127,33658,393],"class_list":{"0":"post-473024","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-margaret-thatcher","13":"tag-netflix","14":"tag-steve-coogan","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116533525802829289","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/473025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}