2 out of 5

Developed by: Howard Gordon, Jeffrey Nachmanoff, Mark Bomback

covers season 1

‘Legends’ winds up in a good place.  But it has a hell of a time getting there.

Sean Bean plays Martin Odum, undercover FBI guy who excels at remaining in ‘legend’ – in his cover – for extended periods of time.  Martin is ‘the best,’ and we open up the series in the middle of an op which, of course, goes bad.  Martin complains that he was ‘this close’ to finding out something or other, and whatever other cop stereotypes you can toss in there, including the operative who’s forever doubting of Odum’s abilities (Crystal, played by Ali Larter), protective but ‘my boss is breathing down my neck’ boss Nelson (Steve Harris), and Martin’s ex-wife (Sonya, played by Amber Valletta) who split because Martin’s too dedicated to his job.  We’re told that Odum is a risk because he has trouble differentiating between his own life and his legends’, and then we’re shown the same when Martin seems to slip into an undercover identity mid-conversation.  Later, someone mysterious will say “don’t trust anyone” or something similar, and Martin will actually scream “Who am I?” all anguished and shit.  Yes, it’s as cheeseball as it sounds, but unfortunately we’re playing it straight, with ‘edgy’ edits and a raw lighting style.  But that’s fine, we allow our dramas to dip into the pool of cliche and cheese (mmm); the biggest problem with Legends is that it just never bothers to establish an investment into Martin’s crisis.  He’s screwed up from the start of the series, and we never really get to see Bean being ‘the best,’ as Odum frequently goes against procedure in ways that don’t always seem to help more than playing by the rules would’ve.  The show also wants to try for an ep-by-ep structure while dropping a couple overall ‘nothing’s what it seems’ clues in the background; this means each episode (or two) is about one case, which means, of course, that Martin has to take a different undercover identity each time.  And of course all of these feature different outfits and accents.  This becomes especially grating when Bean goes for – I’m sorry to say – a horribly unconvincing Southern twang at one point…  But let’s digress.  This process follows for a little more than half the season.  Past that mark, while the cliches aren’t necessarily avoided, Legends at least starts to focus more on its ongoing mystery involving Odum – a haunted past he can’t remember – and the last three episodes successfully build to a point where we are interested, and leave us in good standing to have a more streamlined second season should things continue.  It’s understandable that the writers of Legends wanted to build up to that point for the cliffhanger, but the actual execution of ‘build up’ was scattershot until we were close to the end.