Netflix has released the official trailer and announced the release date for Legends, an upcoming British crime thriller series starring Academy Award nominee Steve Coogan and Tom Burke, known for his role in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. The series is inspired by a true story involving untrained undercover spies who operated as part of a secret government initiative using ordinary customs employees to infiltrate drug cartels.
Set in the early 1990s, the show explores how Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise struggled to combat illegal drug smuggling across Britain’s borders. In a bold move, a covert operation was launched, deploying a small team of everyday customs workers to go undercover and penetrate some of the country’s most dangerous drug gangs.
The official synopsis describes the operation: “In the early ’90s, Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise was losing its battle with illegal drug smuggling across Britain’s borders. The solution was extraordinary. In a top-secret operation, a small team of Customs employees was sent undercover. Their task — to infiltrate Britain’s most dangerous drug gangs. But these were not trained spies. They were normal men and women, plucked from ordinary lives around the UK, put through a basic training regime, and tasked with building new identities in the criminal underworld. These identities were called legends.”
Legends is a six-episode series scheduled to premiere on May 7, 2026. The cast also features Hayley Squires as Kate, Charlotte Ritchie as Sophie, Aml Ameen as Bailey, Jasmine Blackborow as Erin, Douglas Hodge as Blake, Tom Hughes as Carter, Johnny Harris as Eddie, Gerald Kyd as Mylonas, Numan Acar as Hakan, Joshua Samuels as Zeki, Kem Hassan as Aziz, and Thomas Coombes as Shaun. The series is created and written by Neil Forsyth, with directing credits to Brady Hood and Julian Holmes. It is executive-produced by Ben Farrell and Forsyth for Tannadice, Richard Bradley for Lion Television, and produced by Charlie Leech.
Reflecting on the series, Forsyth shared, “I’ve written shows in the past that are about well-known events. You then tell the story behind it that isn’t so well known. This is unique, in that the work of the Legends is barely known at all… There was this core team of people that did all of this, and they did it almost without any public recognition.”
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