Radar: Legends (Netflix)
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Last night I finished watching Legends on Netflix, a series about the undercover investigators who foiled a huge heroin importation in the 1980s. Featuring Steve Coogan, Tom Burke, Tom Hughes and Hayley Squires it was a first rate example of British drama, with British actors about British history, made by Tannadice Productions, an independent British TV company. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.
I realise that the BBC can’t air all British programmes like this, however it does raise the question: why not? This comes in the same week that the BBC have just aired an advertisement fronted by Romesh Ranganathan, a personality with several BBC shows and therefore several vested interests in the success of the BBC; his success is the BBC’s success and vice versa, and indeed the same can be said of all the other ‘stars’ featured in the video. The advert focuses on the question: ‘What has the BBC ever done for me?’ This is a re-write of the 1985 advert fronted by John Cleese which pursued a slightly different question: ‘What has the BBC ever given us?’ I want to write about Legends here, but at the same time, I couldn’t help but think when I watched this programme, why the BBC couldn’t have aired it? The licence fee has been under scrutiny for a long time, but when many of us already pay for Netflix and Disney+ and Apple TV and whatever else, so the question for the BBC is not ‘what has the BBC ever done for me?’ but ‘what does the BBC offer that the other streamers can’t?’ And, personally, I’m struggling to see their answer to this question. The BBC is £15 per month, if you take the annual £180 fee and divide it by 12, which is almost three times more expensive than the monthly fee for Netflix or Disney+. Now, while I appreciate the BBC also offers radio, when I think about the amount of BBC broadcasts I engage with, it really doesn’t warrant this amount, in comparison to the other fees I pay the other streamers and what I can get out of them. You may disagree with me, but these are big questions which the new director general needs to be asking, and let’s hope he will.
Nevertheless, BBC licence fee aside, Legends made me think about what makes great TV, and I think there are three elements, all of which it delivered with aplomb:
A great story.
Great acting.
A great ending.
The first two might seem obvious, and, indeed, while I’m sure the story of Legends has been embellished in this series, the bare bones of it – getting ordinary Customs employees to become undercover investigators and succeed in bringing down a multimillion pound drug cartel – is stranger than fiction. The actors were perfectly chosen for the roles, and while I wonder if there is a slight limit to Coogan’s range, he brings a quality, or perhaps levity, to the show that keeps it buoyed up throughout. Tom Burke was excellent and is fast becoming one of the staples of all great British crime dramas – he brings a sense of credibility and evokes the everyman character with conviction.
However, it’s the third point for which Legends deserves more praise. How often do we see the neverending TV series, which seems to lead viewers on a merry dance, series after series with no prospect of there ever being a resolution or tying up of ends? Remember Lost? That seemed to be one of the first series which verged on exploiting viewers’ sense of expecting a conclusion but never giving one. My main objection to these infinity series, as I like to call them, is that they are written not with a sense of conclusion in mind, and therefore a sense of architecture but that they are written with the express purpose of being open-ended and therefore infinite, and by extension infinite in their ability to make money. The model for dramas such as Lost, it seems to me, were founded on profit making as opposed to integrity of plot or writer’s craft. I sincerely hope Legends doesn’t fall prey to this model, which is a model surely forged in boardrooms of television executives as opposed to the writers' room.
Moreover, it points to another, bigger issue: the difficulty of ending a story. How many stories have you read, how many programmes have you watched that ended badly? More than most, would be my answer to that. Ending a story, resolving it, is surely the hardest job of a writer, as it points to the overall planning and plotting of the piece. Now, granted, Legends is based on a true story, which obviously helps it in this regard, as the series ends where the story ended in history (no spoiler alerts here), however there are too many other programmes being made which just don’t ever seem to end, and for me this points to a lack of craft as much as anything else.
Legends, however, has one of the best endings of a drama in recent memory and builds so well over the six episodes that you feel you’ve been watching twelve episodes as opposed to six. I’ve yet to go and watch Nolan’s The Odyssey at the cinema, however Legends reminded me of the epic scale of a drama that can be achieved on the small screen, and renewed my faith in homegrown drama.
