Critic Reviews

Multiple-personality thriller starts a bit slowly Wednesday night, but early signs still indicate a summer keeper for TNT.

Good re-start and better than the real start last season.

Legends, which is based on a novel by Robert Littell and produced by a team that includes "Homeland" veterans Howard Gordon and Alexander Cary, has an unusual sense of melancholy, which seems to emanate from Bean's soulful performance.

[Martin's] got his own troubles, and at least up front they make for some engaging television.

The reinvented Legends is a maddening puzzle. It's exhausting. But also thrilling.... Somehow, at the end of each episode, the pieces fit together and make sense--only to raise new questions. Fans of spy yarns will lap up every second.

In the early going, the series works best as sort of a modern-day “Mission: Impossible,” and could actually use more of that show’s caper elements.

It's all a fairly standard spy-thriller template, but the cast and crew give Legends an edge. Trust Howard Gordon ("Homeland," "24") and company to devise a well-plotted mystery.

It’s a pleasure to watch Bean fall into his “legends,” or fake identities, even as the show pushes the boundaries of what TV audiences might accept when it comes to instantaneous computer heroics.

The 10-episode series, based on a book by Robert Littell and premiering Wednesday, has been constructed as a wide and solid if somewhat workmanlike platform for the British actor's considerable talents.

When it isn't outlandish, it has a more seriously entertaining side in the mystery of a hooded man who was mortally wounded while trying to tell Martin that even his identity as Martin is not real.