There’s something to be said about the use of restraint in a crime drama. Less chases and gunfights, a script not trying so hard to be funny… it all adds up to a show that demands attention, like the new Netflix series Legends.

LEGENDS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: A teenager exits his apartment and picks up a soccer ball. “Liverpool. 1990.”

The Gist:  We see the teen going to a party with his friends, where they shoot up heroin, only the teen ends up being unresponsive. At Oxford University, a group of students smoke heroin after a formal, and one of the women in elegant dresses is shown to also be unresponsive.

At the London offices of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise, director of investigations Angus Blake (Douglas Hodge) and his head of operations, Don Clark (Steve Coogan), read about both deaths, and Blake gets called into his boss’ office. With a recession looming, PM Margaret Thatcher wants a win, so she’s targeting England’s heroin epidemic. Customs would lead the effort to stop the flow of heroin into the country, but Blake tells his boss in no uncertain terms that they don’t have the resources.

He doesn’t get extra money, or gets to hire anyone, but gets the freedom to train current Customs agents to go undercover. He puts Don, who used to be undercover himself, in charge of the training.

Various Customs agents, who are tired of tracking down VAT dodgers or searching bags at the airport, are shown a flyer that says, “CAN YOU DO MORE?” About fifty of them go to the top-secret training at a site that’s off-book.

Don knows what he’s looking for in an undercover agent, and he eventually winnows the class down to four people: Guy (Tom Burke), who seems to do well as a lone wolf; Erin (Jasmine Blackborow), who is good with data; Kate (Hayley Squires), who has determination on her side; and Bailey (Aml Ameen), who is good at getting information from people.

Don talks to them about their undercover personas, or as they call them, their “legends.” He tells them that they need to fully live their legends while they’re undercover or they’ll be discovered, but also need to make sure that the work and the identity doesn’t consume them. We don’t quite see that yet with Kate and Bailey, who are sent to Liverpool. But it certainly could happen with Guy, a husband and father, who dives completely into the Turkish crime scene in London with the help of a Customs informant named Mylonas (Gerald Kyd).

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Neil Forsyth, Legends is similar to any number of crime dramas about a team of agents going undercover to root out criminal activity, like Slow Horses.

Our Take: Another show that Legends reminded us of is Citadel, and not just because the second season of that show also has a team assembled to take on the bad guys. It’s an illustration on how just a little bit of restraint can vastly improve these kids of shows.

Legends is restrained in its action sequences, it’s restrained in its sense of humor, and its restrained in how it develops its characters. But that doesn’t mean it’s boring; in fact, the restraint helps viewers latch onto the characters more and follow them as they navigate these undercover “legends” and the worlds they’re trying to infiltrate.

It’s a very British series, which may explain some of that restraint. But Forsyth also wants to make sure that viewers aren’t distracted by characters who seem like they’re superhuman or are able to dodge a fusillade of bullets.

The two characters we see multiple dimensions from are Coogan’s character Don and Burke’s character Guy. Don’s been there and done that and knows how tough it is to recover from pretending to be someone else for months or even years. But he sees something in Guy, who is a natural at keeping his legend intact, even in the face of the Leeds cops arresting him when Don challenges him to go into a club and set up a deal for ecstasy pills.

He’s the only one of the group who’s outside life we know anything about, but we suspect that will change as the season goes along. But Guy’s backstory is intriguing enough to satisfy us until those other characters get their moments.

Performance Worth Watching: Tom Burke has always had an edgy gruffness about him, even in a more traditional detective role like in C.B. Strike. He makes Guy a much deeper character than the usual undercover agent in a procedural, just by showing how vulnerable he is.

Sex And Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: In order to keep some of the Turkish gang’s thugs from finding the card his daughter made for him, Guy walks up to the gun one of them is pointing at him and puts his head on the muzzle. This is as we hear Don tell the agents, “You’re going to go places in your body and your mind that you can’t imagine. And some of you won’t come back.”

Sleeper Star: Charlotte Richie is Sophie, Guy’s wife, who is also a Customs agent. She knows what this undercover job means to her husband, but we’re sure we’ll see her fretting about what it might do to his mental well-being.

Most Pilot-y Line: When the students are presented data and told to flesh out who might be in charge of a drug ring based on that data, one student points out that the info is classified and they shouldn’t be seeing it. After a beat, he asks Don, “Do you want me to go?” Don replies, “Yeah, I reckon so.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. While the first episode of Legends could have fleshed out some of the main characters a little better, it does just enough — with enough restraint — to keep us watching.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.