What to stream this week: Steve Coogan’s cracking Netflix crime drama, plus five more picks

This week’s picks include Steve Coogan’s retro crime drama, the return of Jack Ryan (again), another Yellowstone spin-off and Pop Culture Jeopardy! lands on Netflix.

Legends ★★★★ (Netflix)

Told in a succinct six episodes, Legends is a very British take on the international crime drama – imagine The French Connection remade by the Minder crew. It’s the early 1990s, heroin overdoses are surging, and an under-siege Margaret Thatcher needs a win. The solution? Posters asking “Can you offer more?” in the tearooms belonging to Her Majesty’s Customs. Undercover investigators are to be recruited from the baggage inspectors and dirty magazine investigators, to infiltrate murderous drug syndicates. Training lasts three weeks.

The show is very loosely based on historic events. It’s “inspired” by the memoir of Guy Stanton, who spent 11 years working undercover for Customs targeting drug importers. The Guy Stanton here, played by Tom Burke, is an unfulfilled Customs officer who is one of the few – alongside Kate (Hayley Squires) and Bailey (Aml Ameen) – to pass the screening process run by veteran agent Don Clarke (Steve Coogan). Sardonic and counter-intuitive, Don promises his graduates the greatest challenge of their lives, albeit without a per diem.

Legends is not a complicated procedural. If you want one related to British criminal history, see creator Neil Forsyth’s previous show The Gold, which uses a daring 1983 armed heist to explore institutional corruption and social struggle. This is a smash and grab operation, told with telling humour and constant risk. If the undercover agents, divided between Liverpool and London, make one mistake with their false identities – their legends – they face instant execution.

Yes, the agents infiltrate vicious drug networks with surprising ease, but Forsyth is such an accomplished storyteller that you don’t have time to stress-test plausibility. Some creators would spend the entire first episode on the selection and training process – Forsyth gets it sorted in 15 minutes of screen time.

But that doesn’t mean that the characters don’t have a wellspring of motivation. Legends is a series about ordinary people finding a purpose by reaching for the extraordinary, even if they risk – particularly Guy – getting lost in the role.

With a chef’s kiss period soundtrack (The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays), the limited series develops sharply effective portraits of characters who could be gangster cliches. Johnny Harris is immense as Liverpool enforcer Eddie McKee, questioning what he’s done to his hometown. There’s no commentary on the repetitive struggle of a war on drugs, but authority figures get set straight as the nobodies defy the somebodies.

At the centre of it is Coogan, whose droll concern is hilarious and eventually moving. The comic actor does a cracking Michael Caine impression, but with Legends he’s mastered a Michael Caine role.

Jack Ryan: Ghost War ★★ (Amazon Prime)

It’s best to view this action thriller, a continuation of the series about John Krasinski’s unerring CIA operative, as a piece of nostalgic fantasy. In a time of asymmetric warfare and nations making demands via social media, a plot focused on former black ops soldiers gone rogue feels quaint, especially when they berate the United States for developing a “conscience”. The tourist campaign-friendly shots of Dubai, augmented by dialogue extolling its safety, also don’t pass the pub test.

Krasinski, who co-wrote the screenplay, has the title role down pat: moral sparring with his friend and mentor, now CIA deputy director James Greer (Wendell Pierce); exasperated banter with long-time comrade Mike November (Michael Kelly). With Sienna Miller added as hard-nosed MI6 agent Emma Marlow, the shallow plot has the team chasing veterans of the post-9/11 war on terror who’ve become a bit zero dark shirty.

There are references to losing faith in your country even as you fight for it, but for the most part, Ghost War feels like an awkward translation of the series. A relatively concise feature film doesn’t allow for a particularly detailed plot, but the action sequences haven’t been upscaled to serve as exciting set pieces. The fight choreography is rote, the stunts middling. Krasinski is the fifth actor to play Ryan since 1990. The franchise needs a reset before the sixth starts.

Dutton Ranch ★★★ (Paramount+)

With the flinty couple of Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) and Rip Wheeler (Cole Hauser) as the focus, this is the most high-profile of the many Yellowstone spin-offs, even if the creator of the modern-day western franchise, Taylor Sheridan, isn’t directly involved. Showrunner Chad Feehan (Lawmen: Bass Reeves) moves the duo from Montana to south Texas, but it’s a new setting with an old problem: rival ranches and ornery competitors – played by the likes of Annette Bening and Ed Harris – soon prove be to cunning adversaries. It sets up with reassuring ease for Yellowstone devotees. No surprises here.

Kenny Dalglish ★★★½ (DocPlay)

British filmmaker Asif Kapadia usually emerges from the archives with posthumous documentaries about subjects whose brilliance broke boundaries: Senna, Amy and Diego Maradona. His latest subject, also a footballer, is Scottish legend Kenny Dalglish. But in focusing on the forward’s 14 years at Liverpool as a player and then player-manager, Kapadia looks at Dalglish as a humble source of resilience to a city that was struggling. And that’s before the pair of horrific crowd disasters at underprepared stadiums (which Kapadia thoroughly dissects). Dalglish, who supplies the narration, is the dignified everyman burdened by tragedy.

The End ★★½ (HBO Max)

Joshua Oppenheimer directed one of the most crucial documentaries of this century, 2012’s haunting The Act of Killing, but his star-studded dramatic feature, which bounced around the film festival circuit, is more in the realm of cult curiosity. A post-apocalyptic musical, it’s set in an isolated bunker where an oil tycoon (Michael Shannon), his wife (Tilda Swinton), their naive son (George McKay) and entourage have lived for 20 years after a global climate catastrophe. When an outsider (Moses Ingram) enters, the dynamic is upended. The moral inquiry, like the tunes, can drag.

Pop Culture Jeopardy! ★★★ (Netflix)

Affably hosted by Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost, this spin-off of the Jeopardy! format keeps the quiz show’s distinctive structure while easing the subject matter from general knowledge to popular culture. While the references are distinctly American, Australian viewers can still play along. This is an experiment for Netflix, which has picked up the series from Amazon Prime after an underachieving first season. Quiz shows are not a genre Netflix has cracked, but the streaming giant is leaning in by releasing an episode daily, instead of a complete season drop.

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