Tom Burke joins Legends in Netflix’s 1990s crime drama

tom burke joins Legends, the new Netflix drama from Neil Forsyth, as one of the officers sent into heroin-smuggling circles in the 1990s. The series is built around Don, a jaded detective played by Steve Coogan, and it lands on Netflix from Thursday.

Don and the misfit team

Steve Coogan stars as Don, who puts together a team of misfit customs employees for the operation. Burke appears among the officers who embed themselves within criminal gangs, with Hayley Squires also in the cast.

The setup pulls the story away from a straightforward police procedural. Legends is described as a slow burn compared with The Gold, which signals a different pace for viewers who know Forsyth’s earlier work and a more methodical approach to the material.

1990s heroin-smuggling rings

The series draws on real events from the 1990s, when officers infiltrated heroin-smuggling rings at the behest of Margaret Thatcher. That origin gives the drama a specific political and historical anchor rather than a generic crime premise.

Margaret Thatcher’s line that the operation offered “a crisis she could solve” is the sharpest clue to the show’s pressure point: the mission was not just about arrests, but about turning a public problem into an answerable state project. That framing also explains why the story can carry both procedural detail and political weight without leaving the customs operation behind.

Netflix from Thursday

From Thursday, Legends is available on Netflix, putting Burke back in a prestige crime series with a cast built around Coogan, Squires and Forsyth’s real-event setup. For viewers deciding whether to add it to the queue, the draw is not mystery alone but the combination of a 1990s case study, an undercover team and a slower, more deliberate tone.