It\u2019s a plot born for TV, the sort of fish-out-of-water premise upon which half of Hollywood\u2019s buddy comedies are built. Legends stars Steve Coogan as the agents\u2019 handler, in what must be one of his best performances, given that I didn\u2019t spend the whole time he was marching round the screen looking gruff and tormented, thinking, \u201cYeh, sorry, that\u2019s just Alan Partridge.\u201d 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\u2019t. It\u2019s much darker.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It is, of course, the most poisoned of chalices to compare any television show to The Wire<\/a> \u2014 I wouldn\u2019t want to pretend that Legends manages to convey five soaring seasons\u2019 worth of complexity in this six-episode series. But Forsyth has a remarkable ability to capture minor characters\u2019 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, \u201cHe\u2019s here! Come on, he\u2019s here,\u201d as a young squaddie gets out.\u00a0<\/p>\n Two and a half minutes later the young man is shooting up, and you just know \u2014 somehow \u2014 that it\u2019s 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\u2019s a fantastic bit of storytelling. The whole show is.\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, enough gushing. Let\u2019s get down to brass tacks. I need your help with something. These things I know: Amandaland<\/strong> and its predecessor Motherland are lauded as some of the best comedies to come out of the BBC in recent years. Lucy Punch\u2019s Amanda is a fantastic creation, mortifyingly aspiring in the glorious tradition of Hyacinth Bucket. In Amandaland \u2014 now in its second series \u2014 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n There are some lovely one-liners. \u201cIf you like those, I\u2019d recommend The Handmaid\u2019s Tale,\u201d suggests a fellow mother after Amanda has been showing off about all the dystopian fiction she\u2019s been reading. \u201cOh sure,\u201d replies our hero, \u201cI\u2019ll check that out, I like anything handmade.\u201d I\u2019d defy anybody not to enjoy Amanda strutting round after taking out a personal loan, claiming that her lifestyle \u201cbusiness\u201d Senuous has attracted \u201csome major Chinese investors\u201d, \u201ca banking corporation based out of Hong Kong and Shanghai\u201d. \u201cYou mean HSBC?\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t think people call it that.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019 school about her \u201ccareer\u201d as an influencer. The same thing happened to me with The Office and The Inbetweeners. I just can\u2019t do it. I am not constitutionally robust enough to watch even fictional characters embarrass themselves that much.<\/p>\n 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?\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s wrong rather than smiling weakly and scuttling round the corner \u2014 definitely round the corner, don\u2019t want to upset anybody \u2014 to tip it away?<\/p>\n 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\u2019d ever tell you that, obviously.\u00a0<\/p>\n What are you watching on TV right now? Let us know in the comments below<\/p>\n Love TV? Discover the\u00a0best shows on Netflix<\/a>, the\u00a0best Prime Video TV shows<\/a>\u00a0and the\u00a0best Apple TV+ shows<\/a>. Don\u2019t forget to check\u00a0our critics\u2019 choices to watch<\/a>\u00a0and our comprehensive\u00a0TV guide<\/a>, plus our look at the finest\u00a0films<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0TV shows<\/a>\u00a0this month<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Wire, Breaking Bad, Peaky Blinders, Top Boy. Why is it that so many of the grand, sweeping…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":477208,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[265],"tags":[18,117,19,17,128],"class_list":{"0":"post-477207","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-ie","11":"tag-ireland","12":"tag-tv"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116548129777785490","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477207","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=477207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/477208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Amanda](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/71951b76-608c-4df8-a3b8-11c5dddc5150.jpg\")
Lucy Punch returns in AmandalandNatalie Seery\/BBC<\/p>\n